Life Satisfaction and Internal Migration Experience

Our study links the life satisfaction of internal migrants with assessment of their migration outcomes in relation to the people back home and their integration experience. Our research adds to a growing body of literature on the integration of internal migrants in three ways. First, we extend the understanding of the subjective dimension of integration. Second, we have refined two important concepts for measuring migrant experience in our research. We differentiate between ties to the current local environment and ties to the home town/village. Besides, we compare objective socioeconomic outcomes, subjective perceived economic outcomes, and compared socioeconomic status of migrants with their significant others. Third, we provide a more “realistic and comprehensive” picture of life satisfaction among migrants by comparing relative importance of a set of variables. Data for this study come from a survey of rural-urban migrants in 2015-16 in Guangzhou, China. The findings show that income, perceived social status, perceived socioeconomic status in comparison to fellow villagers back home and to local residents, and local ties with relatives or fellow villagers all have significant relationships with life satisfaction. Implications are discussed.