GMS is a longitudinal household survey that aims to better understand immigrant assimilation in the urban areas of Guangdong province by oversampling and comparing the households of migrants and local residents.

Given the rise of urban-to-urban migration, GMS covers both rural-urban and urban-urban migrants, paying particular attention to migrants living in urban villages – a widely prevalent phenomenon in Guangdong province that provides inexpensive housing to relatively unskilled migrants as well as abundant labor to the service and labor-intensive industries nearby. Due to difficulties in constructing the sampling frame thus far, there is no household survey containing sufficient observations of these migrants. For this reason, their living conditions and residential dynamics are still unknown. To close this gap, the SDC has completed the pilot of constructing the sampling frame in 2019.