Women’s migration status, education, and transition to second births in China

In China, there is a negative educational gradient and a rural-urban divide in births. The household registration (hukou) system that controls internal migration selectively favors highly educated migrants for permanent residency in their city of destination. With China’s rapid industrialization, the influx of migrants into urban regions likely reshapes the fertility landscape. As of 2022, there were 296 million rural migrant workers in China, and these migrants were heterogeneous in educational attainment. Yet little is understood about how migration and education intersect to shape fertility behavior, especially the transition to second births. This research, therefore, asks what the transition to second births would reveal about the differences in fertility among urban residents and rural-to-urban migrants, and whether education interacts with migration status and fertility. The study adopts discrete-time event history analysis to analyze seven waves of data from the China Family Panel Studies (2010–2022). It distinguishes between four groups based on hukou status: rural resident, rural floating population, hukou migrant, and urban native. Findings suggest that the rural population is more likely than the urban population to transition to second births. The educational difference in the transition to second births is greater among the rural floating population than among the urban population. The highly educated rural floating population’s likelihood of second births is closer to that of the highly educated hukou migrants and urban natives than to rural residents. This research provides a comprehensive analysis of how migration status impacts women’s fertility beyond the first birth, shedding light on the importance of understanding migrant fertility in urban China.