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Nearly 300 million migrants now live in China's urban centers. In China, migration contributes both to the social mobility of individual families and to the production of social inequality within and across Chinese communities. In this dissertation, I examine the complexity and heterogeneity of migration and the migrant population, and investigate how migration has co-evolved with institutions, labor markets, and social contexts to shape inequality in contemporary China. In Chapter 1, I document features of a newer, growing migration flow: the return of children to rural regions. Using multi-state life tables with nationally-representative data, I demonstrate that a substantial share of migrant children return to origin communities. By the age of 16, more than half of migrant children have returned to natal regions. Though much attention is appropriately given to the incorporation of migrant children into urban settings, return migration is common, and the reincorporation of urban migrants back into rural societies and rural school systems warrants both policy and research attention. In Chapter 2, I examine how permanent and temporary migrant children --- migrant children with and without local hukou status --- fare in urban education systems. Temporary migrant children face significant barriers to attend public schools in urban centers. Over the past decade, policy reform designed to improve access to public education is widely perceived as benefitting these children. Here, I show that these reforms have primarily benefited temporary migrant children who are already relatively socioeconomically advantaged. I then demonstrate that a more advantaged group of migrants-migrants with permanent migration status (i.e., who have local hukou)-still are less likely to attend top middle schools than their peers born in urban centers. For both migrant groups, enduring barriers to attendance at the country's best schools contribute to ongoing intergenerational stratification. The findings underscore the substantial socioeconomic variation among China's migrant population and reveal how recent shifts in policy have grown both horizontal and intergenerational stratification. In Chapter 3, I investigate the effects of labor market formalization on the longstanding wage gap between migrants and local (i.e., urban-born) workers in China. I first demonstrate that migrants from rural areas constitute a large and growing share of the informal labor market in urban centers, and that informal employment contributes to the substantial and enduring migrant wage penalty. I then consider whether, and how, a national policy designed to formalize employment has affected the migrant wage penalty. I leverage province-level differences in the enforcement of the 2008 Labor Contract Law and compare employment and wage patterns between local and migrant workers over time within provinces. The results suggest that the benefits of the formalization policy were only experienced by urban local workers, who are now more likely than in the pre-2008 period to have contracted employment. Because formal workers earn more than informal workers, the enforcement of the law ended up, if anything, increasing the migrant wage penalty in China's urban centers. This study not only highlights ongoing inequity in labor market conditions but also reveals the unintended consequences of labor market policies on wage inequality.
