Are temporary migrants escapees of the one-child-per-family population policy: a revisit to the detachment hypothesis.
Using Hubei province as a case study, this paper retests the detachment hypothesis against the three conventional hypotheses regarding migration-fertility linkage (i.e., selectivity, disruption, and adaptation hypotheses) in explaining migrant and non-migrant fertility differentials in China. The analysis of yearly order-specific birth probabilities suggests that temporary migrants exhibit a significantly higher probability of having a second or higher order birth than comparable permanent migrants and non-migrants. This higher fertility among temporary migrants occurs after migration; temporary migrants actually do not differ from non-migrants in fertility before migration. But permanent migrants experience no significant change in their fertility after migration. The results lend a strong support to the detachment hypothesis, which best explains the fertility differentials between migrant and non-migrant populations in contemporary China; the separation of temporary migrants' actual residence from their official one does lead to a greater likelihood among temporary migrants to have unplanned births.
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Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA.
D000328:Adult; D001723:Birth Rate; D002681:China / Q000453:epidemiology; D005193:Family Planning Services; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016015:Logistic Models; D011640:Public Policy; D014171:Transients and Migrants