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• We present Chinese migrant parents' dynamic perceptions of their roles, abilities, and contributions in and to HSI. • Parents initially self-select to participate in HSI and then self-disqualify. • We challenge the stereotypes that migrant parents are indifferent and incompetent in educational involvement. • We unravel the symbolic biases and exclusionary practices that marginalize migrant parents in HSI. In the past decades, the expansion of parentocracy in China's official and civil rhetorics has bolstered the home-school interaction (HSI hereafter) paradigm where parents actively participate in children's schooling. In previous studies, migrant parents are usually simply described as cohorts who are unwilling and incompetent to HSI. This paper introduces the concept of "involvement imaginaries" to capture migrant parents' dynamic perceptions of their roles, abilities, and contributions in and to HSI. The findings suggest a process wherein migrant parents self-select to integrate themselves into the urban HSI field and acquire urban disposition, and then come to self-disqualify in encountering structural and institutional barriers. Through this, the study challenges the stereotypes about migrant parents and contributes to understanding the symbolic biases and violence that exclude them from HSI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]