Constraint and Inclusion: Variations in the Judicial Governance of Migrants

This study examines the judicial treatment of domestic migrants in China's criminal justice system. Despite extensive scholarship on migrant criminality, systematic analyses of judicial responses to migrant offenders remain underdeveloped. This research addresses this empirical gap by investigating sentencing patterns as a governance mechanism that reveals how Chinese courts operationalize competing imperatives of public-order maintenance and migrant incorporation.

Leveraging over 160000 criminal court judgments from basic-level courts (2020—2021), the study employs a novel identification strategy that uses hukou-crime location discrepancies to classify migrant defendants. Integrating granular data on linguistic distance and municipal economic development indicators, the research conducts a multi-level assessment of how cultural proximity and the local political economy affect judicial decision-making.

The empirical analysis reveals, first, that migrant defendants receive systematically longer sentences than local defendants for comparable offenses, even controlling for case-specific factors and jurisdictional characteristics. This sentencing disparity demonstrates a consistent constraining function by which courts impose enhanced penalties on non-local offenders as a result of judicial responsiveness to social stability imperatives and perceived threats to community cohesion.

Second, cultural distance exhibits a non-linear moderating effect on sentencing severity. Migrants from linguistically similar regions face harsher penalties, while those from culturally distant areas receive comparatively more lenient treatment. This curvilinear relationship indicates that judicial actors calibrate the intensity of punishment based on categorical boundaries between proximate “threatening insiders” and distant “non-threatening outsiders,” reflecting cognitive frameworks that shape the perceptions of social risk.

Third, the local economic structure significantly conditions the sentencing outcomes. In small, medium, and many large cities with robust labor demand for migrant workers, courts demonstrate greater leniency, revealing judicial accommodation due to economic dependence on migrant labor. Conversely, in mega-cities facing intensified governance pressures, sentencing severity increases markedly, reaffirming the judiciary's social-control function under conditions of demographic density and administrative complexity.

These findings illuminate a dual logic of judicial governance wherein Chinese courts simultaneously constrain and incorporate migrants. This duality reveals that judicial decision-making transcends formal legal applications, incorporating implicit calculations about social boundaries, stability maintenance, and developmental priorities. These results advance our understanding of the role of the judiciary in managing a highly mobile society and offer insights for improving crime governance by balancing public security with the long-term integration of migrants.