UCLA

This dissertation surveys and analyzes a frequently absent subject in the field of international migration in which scholars have tended to focus overwhelmingly on immigrants: those who would travel or migrate across nation-state borders but do not due to either sociological forces and/or immigration laws. In the introduction, I assess the absence of non-migrants in this field. I stress how more data, knowledge and theories about various non-migrants would help us better answer questions about migrant selectivity, state capacity to control migration, and inequality, mobility and stratification both within and between migrant-sending and migrant-receiving societies. In chapter 1, I demonstrate with survey data collected from 2,395 individuals both denied and granted US visas exiting the US consulates in Beijing and Chengdu that governments are selecting migrants/travelers with respect to cultural habitus. The cultural habitus combined with homophily between the officer and applicant undermines the state capacity to control international legal entry because many officers grant visas to those that express an intent to immigrate and deny them to those that do not. As a result, legal entry into the US becomes stratified by cultural habitus. In chapter Two, I show how due to filial piety and the strong influence Chinese parents have over the career, educational and marital choices of their adult children and how parents’ economic, culture and lifestyle preferences to take precedence over those of their children, many adult children, and particularly women, do not go abroad. Finally, in Chapter Three I draw upon the oral histories of interviewed individuals in Mainland China that previously aspired to immigrate into 16 different countries. With this data I delineate a sequence of sociological processes that disenchant previously aspiring migrants with the prospect of immigrating. Whereas at first the ex-immigrants confronted psychological difficulties with disappointment, boredom and a struggle with language and cultural barriers, over time they become more aware of and discouraged by racial and gender discrimination, a ceiling in obtaining higher socio-economic status in their career, and restrictive visa regimes. Eventually aspiring immigrants decide that they will have a better life as an ex-immigrant than as “just an immigrant.”