Is Migration a Stressor for the Most Talented? Nonspecific Psychological Distress Among Chinese Students in Tertiary Education in China, Germany, and the UK

Hector Cebolla-Boado
Jinming Liu, Tsinghua University
Dorothée Schneider, University of Essex
Yasemin Soysal

Research on the impact of migration on mental outcomes is biased towards economic and unskilled migrant and lacks data linking origin and destination countries to allow for a proper identification of the effect of migration on mental health. Our paper represents a contribution along these two lines. It looks at the mental outcomes (non specific distress) among Chinese students in tertiary education in China, Germany and the UK. Chinese international students represent one of the most important flows of skilled migrants internationally to the point that China is, already, the main sending country of students abroad (UNESCO, 2018). In this paper we use high quality data for studying international students. Our large scale representative survey of a stock of international students in two destinations, show that international students do not seem to suffer from distress or not more than their peers back in origin.

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 Presented in Session 2. Children & Youth