People move.  When the grass is greener on the other side, entire communities have and will uproot and make an exodus—and this well before Moses.  Now, nations are making it illegal to migrate and so illegal migration has become a worldwide issue.  South Americans to North America, Africans and Middle-Easterners to Europe, and in China, rural Chinese move into the wealthier cities.  I’ve never gone hungry or been poor, but moving out of a poor area with no opportunity to a nearby nation with both money and a future, regardless of laws that say you can’t, makes sense to me.  I can’t blame a poor Chinese farmer who makes less than 30 bucks a year for moving to a city where, if he finds employment, he can make the same amount in a month.

Of course, as implied, it is illegal for Chinese rural residents to move to a city without permission.  The law’s purpose is to maintain order: since about a billion Chinese still work the land and are resultantly poor, if only 1/3 of these farmers moved to the cities to work, disaster would be imminent.  The migration would approximately equate to the entire US population moving into Chinese cities.  So the government severely limits people’s ability to leave the countryside.  And, in the past, those Chinese that did leave their farms for jobs in the city, lost almost all government support—including public education for their children.

In theory, cutting off support for illegal immigrants, even within one’s own nation, should work as a deterrent.  Perhaps, to a degree, it does.  But in China it has not stopped people from migrating by the million.  The Chinese statistics say that 6.4 million Chinese children have followed their parents to the cities (with many more left behind.)  Most of these migrants are not getting any education.

Still, some are.  Last time I was in Nan Jing, China I visited and volunteered at a school set up to give the children of these migrant workers at least a basic education.  The rooms were packed full and the teaching equipment was non-existent.  But the students still loved screaming English phrases back at the goofy foreigner.  And, in some other areas, like Beijing and Guangdong, efforts are being made to educate these migrant children by the hundreds of thousands.

Yet, these kids are lucky (and, trust me, not because of my pathetic attempts at education.)  There are still millions of children that don’t get the opportunity for even a bare-bones education.  Though they now live in a city, they can’t get education and so they can’t leave poverty.

The news is that a recent draft amendment to China’s compulsory education law states that local governments are now responsible for the education of the children of migrant workers.  A movement that had already started in some areas of China has become nationwide law.  Is this the right choice?  I think so.  Perhaps more people will move in from the countryside, creating slums and a lowering of the standard of living in the cities, but I think that the migration will continue to occur in manageable numbers—so long as the farmers are not starving.  In the end, what the new law means is a future for millions of children.  I think that’s worth risking an exodus.