Transnational Migration and Home in Older Age

Katie Walsh, Lena Näre, Katie Walsh, Lena Näre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317498377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Emigración e inmigración

This book examines the transformations in home lives arising in later life and resulting from global migrations. It provides insight into the ways in which contemporary demographic processes of aging and migration shape the meaning, experience and making of home for those in older age. Chapters explore how home is negotiated in relation to possibilities for return to the "homeland, " family networks, aging and health, care cultures and belonging. The book deliberately crosses emerging sub-fields in transnationalism studies by offering case studies on aging labour migrants, retirement migrants, and return migrants, as well as older people affected by the movement of others including family members and migrant care workers. The diversity of people's experiences of home in later life is fully explored and the impact of social class, gender, and nationality, as well as the corporeal dimensions of older age, are all in evidence.

1
Introduction

Transnational Migration and Home in Older Age

Katie Walsh and Lena Näre

Transnational migration has transformed the home-making practices of millions of people worldwide over the last few decades. Whether it is our own mobility or that of others that initiates these changes, home lives are taking on new meanings, orientations and attachments as they emerge through contemporary transnational spaces. This reconfiguration has been explored across the social sciences for more than 10 years (Ahmed et al., 2003; Al-Ali and Koser, 2002; Rapport and Dawson, 1998), but the existing literature says very little about the impact of transnational migration on home-making in later life, implicitly conceptualising transnational homes as the exclusive production of migrants in early- and mid- adulthood, with some important exceptions (Gardner, 2002; Heikkinen and Lumme-Sandt, 2013; Huber and O’Reilly, 2004; Lamb, 2002; Lewin, 2005; Seo and Mazumbar, 2011; Zontini, 2014). This volume seeks to build on these interventions, and together the chapters explore the transnational mobilities, practices, imaginaries, strategies, memories, and materialities that increasingly shape experiences of home and complicate the meaning of home in older age. Following this introduction, there are 17 empirical chapters, shorter-than-average invited contributions to foster exploratory inquiry into these concerns: How does this dialectic of home and migration play out in later life? What impact does transnational migration have on home-making in the lives of older people? How do journeys and mobilities figure in this stage of the life course and come to be reflected in experiences of ageing at or in the home? How does homelike care and care ‘at home’ acquire new meaning in transnational contexts and through the employment of transnational migrant workers? The authors reflect on emerging research findings or revisit existing, sometimes comparative or multiproject, data sets. With these diverse insights, we aim not to present the definitive word on transnational migration and home in older age, but to inspire curiosity.

The United Nations (UN; 2013a) report on two demographic trends taking place in nearly all the countries of the world: (a) population ageing (as a result of decreasing mortality and fertility) and (b) the ageing of the older population itself (with increasing numbers of people living past 80 years of age). At the same time, international migration is becoming more complex in form and is having an impact on nearly all countries in the world (United Nations, 2013b). This volume connects these two processes transforming contemporary societies. It brings attention to the people for whom both ageing and migration informs their everyday lifeworlds. When we speak of ‘older age’ or ‘later life’ in this volume we are not referring to a fixed biological notion of age but instead are conceptualising age as a sociocultural construction that emerges in place (Bytheway, 1995; Wilson, 2000) and includes chronological, social and physiological dimensions (Ginn and Arber, 1995). Following Gubrium and Holstein (2000), we are interested not only in ageing as a process but also in the everyday lives of older people where ageing is one, but not the only, defining feature of their lives. In that sense, we are aligned with a humanistic or biographically oriented gerontology that is guided by ‘valuing older people’ and the meanings and interpretations people give to their experiences of later life, while trying to maintain an awareness of structural pressures and constraints, such as wealth and inequality (Edmondson and Kondratowitz, 2009). Therefore, although the individuals discussed in these chapters are ageing and, indeed, in a life stage where ageing can bring with it particularly intense or frequent challenges, the concept of ageing does not encompass everything of significance to their lives. Nonetheless, contributors have been expected to explain the in/exclusions and markers of age that are operationalised in their own research and, encouragingly, these have often arisen or been amended during fieldwork, rather than being imposed by the research design. As might be anticipated, this leads to some positive variability across the chapters in terms of the chronological age of the older people being represented. In Leslie Fesenmyer’s research, for example, the Kenyan women she interviews are in their mid- to late 50s (Chapter 9). Not only can they be considered older in relation to life expectancy and retirement age in Kenya, but also approaching 60 is significant in terms of the negotiation of return migration as part of the ageing process. In contrast, Caroline Oliver (Chapter 12) revisits participants who are now in the later stages of older age, facing challenges of their own ill health and the deaths of spouses and friends in their community. Irrespective of the difference in chronological age, in both empirical cases, ageing and transnational migration are thoroughly entwined in shaping their participants’ home lives.

At this introductory stage, we must explain how we are conceptualising home through the volume, not least because the term has been the focus of considerable multidisciplinary debate. Research on ‘home’ is a well-established but complex field of inquiry that highlights, in particular, how home: firstly, encompasses a material dimension, bound up with domestic practice and everyday life, and an imaginative realm of belonging; secondly, is understood and lived across a range of temporalities; and, thirdly, though often idealised, may also be a site where power plays out in difficult negotiations of personal life (Blunt and Dowling, 2006). Thus, home is widely recognised as having diverse meanings, commonly associated with privacy, domesticity, family, comfort, safety, as well as being a location of gendered work, oppression, and violence (Blunt and Varley, 2004). Indeed, Mallett (2004: 84) concludes her wide-ranging review paper on home with the observation that ‘the term home functions as a repository for complex, inter-related and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationship with one another, especially family, and with places, spaces and things’. The meaning of home can also vary with language, ethnicity, nationality, class (especially wealth), gender, and, of particular relevance here, the intersections of all these factors with age. Indeed, home is thought to play a critical role in maintaining a sense of identity in later life (e.g. Kontos, 2000; Tanner, 2010). Globally, older people face a range of different concerns in relation to their homes, including housing inequality within their age group and in relation to younger generations; proving their fitness to live ‘at home’ independently or their need for care to be provided within the home; and adapting to living alone or, conversely, negotiating intergenerational households and new forms of communal accommodation. Indeed, there is an emerging literature on ageing and home that forms a useful background to our volume but demonstrates that much of the meaning of home in later life is actually consistent with that in earlier life stages. For example, a literature in environmental psychology and gerontology concerned with housing, establishes that the concept of ‘home’ incorporates behavioural, cognitive and emotional elements and is linked to notions of security, belonging and relationships (Oswald and Wahl, 2005; Rowles and Bernard, 2013; Rowles and Chaudhury, 2005; Rubinstein, 1989). Though the authors do not comment upon it, this suggests that older people’s conceptualisation of home shares much in common with that of people in middle adulthood whose perspectives have silently dominated studies of home. Within this literature, home is rarely discussed from the perspective of elderly migrants (except see Lewin, 2005).

Although the impact of transnationalism and migration on home has been elucidated at some length in the literature and we return to this later in the chapter (where we also consider how our individual chapters contribute to the broader literature), the current understanding of the impact of globalisation on older age and ageing is relatively limited and under-theorised. Three current foci of study in migration studies are promising in this respect—namely, research with (a) transnational migrant workers involved in elderly care, (b) retirement migrants and (c) ageing labour migrants—but existing analysis of the experiences of these groups tends to be organised into separate conversations/debates within these subfields and, in relation to ageing, frequently becomes centred on service provision, health and welfare concerns. In this volume, we wish to take a broader approach to the lives of older people, focusing on their subjectivities, attachments and embodied negotiations of belonging to elucidate the significance of their home lives. Home-making in older age may become markedly transnational as people embark upon relocations, returns, and cross-border living arrangements at later stages of the life course, voluntarily or otherwise. Furthermore, there are many older people for whom the everyday experience of home is reconfigured by the transnational livelihoods of others, whether it is their own children emigrating for work or migrant domestic care workers being employed to care for them at home or in ‘homelike’ institutions. Chapters in this volume have been purposively selected to bring together, in one place, research that is more frequently separated by the terminology and parallel debates of contemporary studies of migration. As such, case studies of labour migrants, retired lifestyle migrants, return migrants, as well as nonmigrants affected by the migration of others, are all included here.

In putting together the volume, we intentionally crossed disciplinary boundaries to seek out contributors and this is now reflected in the broad range of perspectives and methodologies in evidence, with gerontologists, geographers, and sociologists among the authors. All the chapters are based on qualitative research and include variations on interviewing from relatively structured to more open-ended and/or life-story techniques and narrative analysis. This is perhaps not surprising since qualitative research is understood to help us better understand the complexities of later life and the meanings older people make of their lives (Gubrium and Holstein, 2000). However, the chapters also reveal the potential of comparative studies (e.g. Buffel and Phillipson, Chapter 5, and Kieran Walsh, Chapter 12) and longitudinal ethnographic immersion (e.g. Oliver, Chapter 15), and there are also some promisingly creative efforts to use visual methodologies (e.g. Kordel, Chapter 7). It is, therefore, apparent that a range of qualitative methodologies are useful in designing research that gives insight into the meaning of transnational migration and home in older age, and there is potential for us to become more innovative via interdisciplinary dialogue.

In the remainder of this chapter, we explain our focus in more detail and introduce the chapters that follow. First, we briefly map existing work on migration and older age, suggesting that to move these debates forward it is helpful to adopt the concept of ‘transnational spaces’ (Jackson et al., 2004) in order to acknowledge a fuller range of older people affected by trans-national flows of migration than existing typologies of ‘elderly migrants’ allow. Second, we revisit debates on migration and home and introduce the very few existing studies that have explicitly focused on what home means for transnational migrants in later life. In the final sections, we outline the contributions of the volume and introduce the sections through which the chapters are organised.

Ageing and Migration in Transnational Space

Since the early 1990s, research on older migrants’ narratives and experiences, as well as migrants’ ageing, has gathered pace. This interdisciplinary field of enquiry incorporates a diverse range of groups as their foci. In the introduction to a Special Issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on ‘Older Migrants in Europe’, Anthony Warnes and Allan Williams (2006) suggested that two core groups of older migrants can be identified: first, those who might be described as affluent retirement migrants or lifestyle migrants in later life and, second, labour migrants who have reached older age and are negotiating ageing in the countries in which they settled during their working lives. Given the hugely different concerns and experiences of ageing between the two ‘core’ groups identified, it is perhaps not surprising that they have largely been viewed as quite separate streams in migration scholarship and two sets of literature have emerged in parallel.

Retirement migration is characterised as the migration of ‘affluent metropolitan early-retirees who move to high-amenity coastal and rural areas’ and initially charted as an internal migration phenomenon in the US and from Northern to Southern European countries (Warnes and Williams, 2006: 1259; see also Gustafson, 2001; King et al., 2000; O’Reilly, 2000). International retirement migrants include many who ‘epitomise the healthier, more active and innovative’ of people in older age (Warnes and Williams, 2006: 1261), and researchers have frequently shown how they may frame their mobility as a strategy of active or positive ageing and themselves as adventurous risk takers (e.g. Gustafson, 2001). Retirement migration includes not only those who migrate relatively permanently, but also people who migrate back and forth in a season-driven transnational residential strategy. International retirement migrants have received significant attention in Europe, their transnational living arrangements thought to be symbolic of wider transformations in the meaning of older age as people fashion new lifestyles and identities in later life (Oliver, 2008). However, like younger lifestyle migrants, their mobility is also related to the comparative status of national economies: older people ‘search for a place where, as well as a more agreeable climate, they can also get more for their money’ (Huber and O’Reilly, 2004). Those researching retirement migration have also documented the social care implications for those who migrate, as well as the policy implications in the receiving destinations resulting from the sociocultural and demographic impact of their large-scale migration (e.g. Casado-Díaz, 2004; Warnes et al., 2004; Hall and Hardill, 2014). In this volume, the chapters by Botterill (Chapter 8) on British retirement migrants in Thailand, by Oliver (Chapter 15) on British retirement migrants in Spain, and by Kordel (Chapter 7) on German retirement migrants in Spain, contribute to this literature. These chapters evidence that the everyday lifeworlds of retirement migrants cannot be fully captured by the positive ideal of ‘active ageing’, but that retirement migration involves various forms of vulnerabilities related to social care and welfare arrangements, as well as related to the ways in which a sense of home and belonging evolve in the process of ageing.

In contrast, the attention to labour migrants ‘ageing-in-place’ has largely been driven by a concern within gerontology about social welfare, marginalisation, and inequality in the increasingly diverse societies of Europe and US (Daatland and Biggs, 2006). ‘Globalisation’, Phillipson and Ahmed (2006: 160) noted, ‘is producing a new kind of ageing in which the dynamics of family and social life may be stretched across different continents and across different types of societies’. This kind of transnational ageing is frequently more difficult for those categorised as labour migrants since they include some of the most disadvantaged and socially excluded older people (e.g. Burholt, 2004; Philipson and Ahmed, 2006). Echoing Torres’ (2001) early call for a ‘culturally rele...