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Similar to the hukou system in China, the household registration system () in Vietnam which represents the citizenship of its people has become a part of the Vietnamese society in the past 60 years. After the economic reform in 1986, the force of system has begun to wane; however, it still plays an essential role in everyday life of Vietnamese. Utilizing the new Household Registration Study (HRS) survey conducted by the World Bank in 2015, this paper employs Instrumental Variables (IV) to estimate the effect of citizenship (household registration status) on migrant workers in urban Vietnam. The main findings detect a pattern of discrimination against temporary residents in term of labor wages, which is different from the result of OLS estimation in the World Bank report.

The main obstacles to migrant workers starting businesses when they return to their hometowns are their own lack of financial literacy and aptitude, a lack of sufficient venture capital, and inadequate financing options. This paper conducts an analysis of the opportunities and challenges under the rural revitalization environment in conjunction with the Internet of Things Technology, through which a migrant labor entrepreneurship analysis platform is built. Data crawling technology is applied to capture internet data resources related to innovative entrepreneurship in the data collection module, and the entrepreneurship data is processed by the Internet of Things Technology. Based on the research, the approach suggested in this paper has its benefits for analyzing the opportunities and difficulties that migrant workers encounter in a rural revitalization context, in order to finally provide some theoretical support for pertinent research.

The formal labor dispute resolution system of administrative organs, arbitration tribunal and courts which have been established to handle labor disputes remains an ineffective tool for migrant workers to resolve their disputes with their employers in China. Moreover, experience has exemplified that among the mediation style, non-official mediators have proven to be more effective in settling cases and helping migrant workers than mediators within the formal system. Taking “Little Bird,” a famous NGO for migrant workers rights protection in China, as an example, this article focuses on the problem of arrears in wages of migrant workers from a sociological-legal perspective. This article argues that the current legal system in China fails to adequately protect the legitimate rights and interests of migrant workers and that informal mediation may help resolve disputes between migrant workers and employers more efficiently. The effectiveness of NGO’s role in handling labor disputes as well as its limitations, would also be analyzed and discussed.

Job seekers benefit from social networks because social contacts could provide useful information about the jobs and exert influence during the job search process. Although many studies find that social capital has positive effects on job outcomes, little is known about how the effects of social networks on job market outcomes are conditioned by the broader social context or how they vary by the characteristics of the network users. In this study, we specifically examine the influence of social networks on migrant workers’ wages and job tenure during different periods of the social and economic transformation in China and among workers of different levels of education. Analyzing the longitudinal work history data from the survey of migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta in 2010, we found that the jobs obtained through social ties with friends or kin have lower wages than jobs found through formal job search methods in the 1980s and 1990s, but using social contacts leads to higher wages in the late 2000s. In addition, informal job searches through friends and kin lead to longer-lasting jobs than job searches through market-based institutions. Finally, a migrant worker’s level of education does not affect the wage return of using social networks during job search.

In contemporary China, despite all the efforts in regulating and institutionalizing labor relations, industrial workplaces still witness pervasive opportunism and distrust. Using two-wave nested workplace surveys, collected from over 280 manufactories in the Yangtze Delta region, and semi-structured interviews of factory owners, managers, and ordinary workers, this study explores migrant peasant workers’ rising radicalism in urban China and traces the social and economic origins of this phenomenon. The authors further examine the role of social ties in shaping migrant workers’ resistance and disobedience, and argue that the effect of social ties may be moderated and constrained by the opportunity structure in the organizations.

While work on the securitization of migration has often held borders to be the site at which state power is most keenly felt, this paper draws on static and walking interviews with Bangladeshi male migrant workers in Singapore to understand their everyday experiences of the securitization within state territory. These narratives demonstrate how the Little India district in Singapore has been scripted as an exceptionally problematic space associated with dangerous migrant bodies, within which Bangladeshi migrants encounter state power in a variety of guises, ranging from police patrols to video surveillance technologies. They also reveal how Bangladeshi migrants continually struggle against these state-led scripts of insecurity, even if their sojourn in Singaporean territory is circumscribed by a condition of permanent temporariness. Through this discussion, the securitization of migration is conceptualized as an unfinished project that is often exerted unevenly and paradoxically within state territory. The security-migration nexus should also not only be understood with recourse to bodies deemed “illegal” and “unwanted” — such as asylum-seekers and undocumented migrants — but should also account for temporary labour migrants who have been legally admitted into state territory, whose labour power is central to the host state’s economy but who are disallowed from ever belonging within the countries they work in.