External Migrants under Mainland China’s Informal Welfare Regime: Risk Shifts, Resource Environments, and the Urban Employees’ Social Insurance

Social insurance in mainland China long catered to populations that were assumed to remain in one place permanently. In recent decades, however, internal and transnational labour migration has been on the rise. Building on existing research about internal migrants’ social security, this study asks how different groups of external labour migrants cope with the social risk shifts induced by mobility. It focuses on documented migrants from UN member countries; from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao; and on undocumented migrants. It employs the resource environment approach, which integrates a transnational perspective and acknowledges informal sources of security. Focusing on healthcare, the study argues that informal practices affect the majority of external migrants irrespective of nationality or migration status, protecting expatriates from double coverage, causing low-income migrants to fall through the gaps, but also enabling access to healthcare for undocumented migrants. Despite mandatory participation, effective migrant coverage of the Urban Employees’ Social Insurance (UESI) remains low. The system is highly decentralized with incomplete internal and external portability, and cities have considerable leeway over their own migration and welfare regimes. Migrants from more socio-economically developed areas tend to have a greater reliance on public services and security from the sending areas, or on high-end private alternatives. Conversely, as the example of Nigerian traders illustrates, undocumented migrants piece together their protective arrangements from individual networks and community institutions. Religious organizations from the Global South also reach out transnationally and provide informal protections to migrant communities. This study employs a mix of ethnographic fieldwork, document analysis, and descriptive statistics.