Stratified by Space: How Housing Prices Shape Residential Outcomes of Taiwan’s Internal Migrants

Shih-Keng Yen, National Chung Cheng University

Over the past five decades, internal migration has played a vital role in Taiwan’s urbanization and socioeconomic transformation. Yet, the residential outcomes of internal migrants—especially those from non-urban backgrounds—remain underexplored. Drawing on data from the 2015, 2020, and 2022 Taiwan Social Change Survey, this study investigates neighborhood quality and residential attainment among internal migrants, with a focus on the moderating role of urban housing prices. Neighborhood quality is measured by the county-level percentile rank of residents’ educational attainment. Using multilevel modeling, the analysis reveals that internal migrants tend to reside in higher-quality neighborhoods than urban natives. However, migrants from non-urban origins face greater difficulty converting their socioeconomic status (SES) into favorable neighborhood outcomes. This disadvantage is most pronounced in urban areas with high housing prices, where even high-SES migrants are less able to realize residential advantages. These findings suggest that place stratification, driven in part by housing market pressures, constrains the spatial mobility of internal migrants. By integrating spatial assimilation and place stratification theories, this study highlights the conditional nature of residential attainment in Taiwan’s high-cost urban contexts, contributing to broader understandings of urban inequality in rapidly developing societies.

Keywords: Internal Migration and Urbanization, Inequality, Disadvantage and Discrimination, Population and Development

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session 152. Internal Migration and Socio-Economic Inequalities