Ageing, Gender, and Labour Migration

Aija Lulle, Russell King

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781349717514
  9781137556141
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137556158
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores how the real conditions and subjective conceptions of ageing and well-being are transformed when people move from one country to another. Focusing on ageing female migrants from Latvia in the UK and other European countries, this book is based on fifty life-history interviews with women aged 40s-60s. Empirical chapters concentrate on functional well-being in migration, which includes access to the economic citizenship of work, income, pensions, and accommodation, and on psychosocial well-being, and explores Latvian women's experiences of intimate citizenship in migration. In addition, the authors' research challenges the trope of vulnerability which generally surrounds the framing of older migrants' lives. The study's findings offer policy-makers insights into the realities of ageing working migrants and advocates for a more inclusive transnational citizenship, better working conditions, and ongoing care arrangements for older migrants post-retirement, either abroador back home.

© The Author(s) 2016

Aija Lulle and Russell KingAgeing, Gender, and Labour MigrationMobility & Politics10.1057/978-1-137-55615-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Ageing Migrants: A New Research Challenge

Aija Lulle^{1, 2, 3} and Russell King¹

(1)

Department of Geography, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

(2)

Department of Social Science, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland

(3)

Centre for Diaspora and Migration Research, University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia

Abstract

Most studies of migration assume migrants to be youthful, but there is an increasing trend for people to migrate at older ages—for lifestyle, retirement, or work reasons. We focus on ageing female migrants from Latvia, mainly in the UK. Fifty life-history interviews were undertaken with women aged 40s–60s. Independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and joining the EU in 2004 were the crucial events that opened up what we call a time-space of possibility for older Latvian women to escape their poor and devalued lives in their home country. The overarching research question is to understand how the real conditions and subjective conceptions of ageing and well-being are transformed when people move from one country to another.

Keywords

AgeingLabour migrationGenderLatviaEuropean Union

End Abstract

1.1 Introduction

I feel younger here… My age does not matter here, nobody pushes my age into my face. There is one criterion—how well I do my job. It is only when I read the Latvian press that I am reminded about my age, this constant pressure, oppressive and depressing… it’s almost as if we have to take a spade and bury ourselves.

The above quote gets to the heart of our research—just a brief extract from our extensive corpus of 50 narrative interviews. The speaker, a Latvian woman in her mid-50s interviewed in England, contrasts the more positive treatment of older women ‘here’ compared to ‘there’, back home in Latvia. In her view, Latvian society either constantly points out what is ‘proper’ for an ageing woman (how to hide her age, fight her wrinkles, and be a good grandmother, to name just a few ‘age reminders’) or simply ignores ageing people as if they are invisible, have no value and no future.

Anti-ageing practices and attitudes—as if older people are somehow lesser citizens—are by no means a localised phenomenon. We can also see that consumerist culture has recognised its long-time blindness with respect to age and, especially, to ageing women. In September 2015 Helen Mirren, now past 70, a world-renowned theatre and cinema queen for decades, became a face of L’Oréal’s skincare line ‘Age perfect’, with the slogan ‘The perfect age, it’s now’. This seems a rather tectonic change—the increasing trend to invite older women to become models for various fashion companies. However, the same consumerist culture still relentlessly puts pressure on ageing women to open their purses for cosmetic products prominently branded as ‘anti-age’. Mirren is possibly the oldest recipient of a major cosmetics contract in modern history.¹ ‘It was about time that someone of my age, not necessarily me, did it’, Mirren herself said in an interview to a British newspaper.² Although cinema stars are great role models to address some of the wrongs of society, neoliberal understandings of ageing can cut like a double-edged sword if ‘active ageing’ becomes imposed as an individual duty and responsibility of a woman to achieve her ageing successfully. Our informants for the empirical research which underpins our analysis of active ageing in this book are migrant women, working in relatively low-waged jobs and yet carving out better lives for themselves. Ageing for them is made meaningful as a process, not as an inevitable ‘ill-being’ stage leading to death. Moreover, ageing becomes meaningful for them already in their mid-life years when migration is chosen in order for them to have one more chance for a better life differently and elsewhere.

This means that ageing is not confined to the later years of a person’s life, just as an ‘older person’ is not to be defined as someone above a certain threshold age, such as 60. We want to stress that ageing is a potentially very long process which typically starts with a mid-life consciousness and the inevitability of getting older. Viewed in this sense, the awareness and the onset of ageing can start in one’s 40s and last potentially for another 40 or more years—half the life cycle. This realisation emphasises the true nature of ageing as a process of ‘becoming’ (Worth 2009) rather than the final stage of life.

We argue that ageing should be broadly incorporated into migration research not only due to the clear demographic trends towards an ageing population in Europe and the Global North, but as an intrinsic factor of life and livelihoods with far-reaching consequences for well-being and broad notions of citizenship across borders and inter-generationally. Moreover, we also emphasise that the ‘entwined trajectories’ of migration and ageing are gendered. Although we focus here on women’s testimonies of migrant life, no doubt more studies in the future are also needed on migrant men, ageing, and changing masculinities.³

One of our aims in this book is to give a policy push to thinking about ageing, gender, and migration differently, by placing ageing migrants themselves at the centre of the discussion about their well-being. In order to do so, we have to see ageing people as full citizens with diverse and complex economic and psychosocial needs and aspirations. As a starting point, we have to appreciate the impact of ageism as a discourse on human well-being. Ageism, as we will argue throughout this book, is as universal as patriarchy, and in order to get to the core of its impact on people and their life trajectories, we have to unpack how ageism manifests itself and how people resist it in specific spatial, temporal, and cultural contexts. We felt it was the right time for us to write this book and fill what we saw as a research gap—the specific study of older women who engage in labour migration in order to improve their lives.

Ageing is an undeniably biological process, yet it is also socially and culturally constructed. Dividing populations into age cohorts based on infancy, education, productive work, and retirement remains a fundamental framework for the social and political organisation of the life cycle, particularly in industrial and post-industrial societies. And yet, in the flow of everyday life, individuals continuously develop insights into their own bodily rhythms and social timetables, and into the discrepancy between their own ageing trajectory and what is stereotypically seen as a physical, behavioural, or social norm for an ‘older person’. As individuals, we often see ourselves as ahead of or behind this constructed trajectory. The friction or non-correspondence between individual realities (which might be as much perceived as real) and the wider social constructs of ageing is the focus of our attention. Whilst we are aware of the complexity of definitions of later life, old age, ageing, and so on, particularly as they are manifested in the current era of fluid post-modern lifestyles, we can do no more here than briefly acknowledge some of the key literature in this wide domain (see, inter alia, Biggs 1993; Bytheway 2000; Andrews and Phillips 2005; Andrews et al. 2009; Schwanen et al. 2012a, b). Several of these authors debate the so-called Cartesian division: on the one hand, the ageing body that inevitably grows old and weaker, and on the other, the spirit that remains forever young. This apparent contradiction is particularly evident in the contrast between stereotypes associating old age with idleness, dependency, and physical and mental illness, and the increasing spread of lifestyle models of positive, active, and healthy ageing. The insight that ageing is indeed socially constructed can come as a revelation at certain moments in an individual’s life course, sometimes expressed in such phrases as ‘turning back the clock’ or ‘rediscovering one’s youth’, and often related to moving to a new place or revisiting an old haunt.

Ageing is also geographically constructed and emplaced (McHugh 2000, 2003). Andrews et al. (2006: 154) emphasise that ‘places serve as crucial material and symbolic sources for biological development’, and thereby make important contributions to modes of citizenship empowerment and well-being. Older migrants in contemporary Europe with relatively free possibilities for mobility are able to compare and evaluate their gendered experiences of ageing and well-being in different spatial and welfare regimes. Latvian migrants in various countries in Europe will provide nuanced accounts from several geographical contexts in this book. As said, our approach is to place the migrant woman herself at the centre of inquiry—we listen to her, follow her in her daily paths, and try to understand what were the motivations, pressures, and aspirations behind her move away from Latvia, why she is travelling back and forth, how she lives abroad, and how she imagines her future. And if we want to make contemporary lives on the move better, also policy-wise, we should understand what it means for a person to hit the emigration trail when no longer young. Therefore, our approach does not come from top-down theories and ideas but from excavating meaningful everyday practices, hopes, and needs from ‘below’—as they were articulated by our informants who lived their early lives in a post-socialist country, Latvia, and latterly in the contemporary European Union.

The book addresses the role of culture and the intertwining politics of ageing, gender, and labour migration in contemporary Europe from a highly distinctive and original angle—that of later-life migration as a potentially positive and empowering experience. Current scholarship usually looks at ageing migrants from the perspective of their vulnerability. Basing our analysis on in-depth interviews with Latvian female migrants in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, we trace their entwined trajectories of ageing and mobility as interlinked processes of ‘becoming’ which yield important lessons across at least four different levels:

• for re-theorising the ageing–migration nexus away from its predominant optic of vulnerability;
• for a reappraisal of the agency and dignity of older people more widely;
• for guiding the politics of migration and social policy at local, national, and EU levels;
• for introducing a gendered analysis of ageing and migration, demonstrating how older women are able to transform their lives through mobility.

Therefore we aim to contribute to novel ways of thinking about European citizenship as having a significant embodied dimension. Through their ability to move from place to place, claiming their new-found European citizenship and their freedom to work, and restoring their sense of self-worth, our informants challenge the vulnerability trope of ageing bodies.

The timeliness of the book is apparent from the frequency of calls for more attention to be paid to ageing migrants. The major exception is the now-extensive literature on international retirement migration, typically of relatively wealthy North Europeans in countries like Spain and France (for some key studies, see King et al. 2000; O’Reilly 2000; Benson 2011).

We will now provide an overview of what has been done so far in the scholarship on the ageing and migration nexus. Then we will introduce the case of post-socialist Latvia in the light of our main research interests—ageing female labour emigrants in contemporary Europe. Next, we present the main research questions which guide our analysis. Finally, we will outline the other four chapters of this book.

1.2 Towards a Typology of Ageing and Migration, and the Specific Category of Ageing Labour Migrants

The literature on the intersections between migration and ageing—on what we call the ageing–migration nexus—has grown apace in recent years, partly as a counterpoint to the predominant framing of migration as a phenomenon of young adults on the move. In two important review articles, Warnes et al. (2004) and Warnes and Williams (2006) have demonstrated how diverse are ageing migrants, ranging from very affluent individuals, such as international retirement migrants, who embrace ageing positively through migration, to ‘ageing-in-place’ labour migrants with poor education and low incomes who are vulnerable and have limited capabilities to cope with ageing in a foreign land. Another stream of literature, pioneered by Baldassar (2007; also Baldassar et al. 2007), looks at the ageing–migration relationship through the prism of transnational care, focusing mainly on the care needs of the left-behind older generation—typically...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Ageing Migrants: A New Research Challenge
• 2. Ageing, Gender, and Migration: Theorising Entwined Becomings
• 3. Functional Well-Being and Economic Citizenship
• 4. Psychosocial Well-Being, Erotic Agency, and Intimate Citizenship
• 5. Conclusions, Discussion, and Policy Implications
• Backmatter