The Impact of Migration Experience on Rural Residents’ Mental Health: Evidence from Rural China

Migration experience is considered to be an important factor affecting mental health. With the increasing number of rural-to-urban migrant workers returning to their hometowns, the impact of migration experience on rural residents is worthy of noting. Using the data from the 2018 China Labor Dynamics Survey, this paper took migration experience as the identification criteria for returning migrant workers and empirically examined the impact of migration experience on rural residents’ mental health. Our results indicated that migration experience had a significant negative impact on the mental health of rural residents. That is, returning migrant workers had a worse mental health status than that of rural residents who never left their hometowns. Mechanism analysis showed that social support and social comparison played an intermediary role in the impact of migration experience on the mental health of rural residents. We also detected considerable heterogeneity in the effects of migration experience: the short-term returning migrant workers and the passive returning migrant workers are more likely to be negatively affected by the migration experience. Our results emphasized the mental health problem faced by returning migrant workers. The policy makers should strengthen psychological education and mental health consultation according to the intergenerational differences and individual characteristics of returning migrant workers.