Abstract
This special issue examines how older adults anticipate and manage their futures through migration. Although ageing is often associated with decline towards the end-of-life, it is still a life stage where (the lack of) planning for the future can profoundly impact the life outcomes of older adults and their caregivers. This collection illustrates different ways migration can impact ageing. For some, perceptions and depictions of the future lead older adults to turn to migration to improve their prospects of ageing well although they continue to face constraints while ageing abroad. For others, the migration of younger family members exacerbates the stress of eldercare felt by non-migrant caregivers. Collectively, the papers focus on how countries in Asia function as source and destination sites for ageing-related migration, while also forging transnational connections with the Global North. Focusing on ageing futures allows us to link the current and future lives of migrants and non-migrants, across generations and space.
Introduction
Research on ageing and migration has flourished in recent years. Amongst the themes explored are concerns over how migration affects grandparenting practices and identities, the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and new media by older migrants, and the care they receive or vulnerabilities they experience as older adults on the move (e.g. Baldassar et al., 2016, 2017; Deneva, 2012; Horn, 2019; Horn & Schweppe, 2019; Kilkey & Merla, 2013; King et al., 2014; Lunt, 2009; Madianou, 2016; Nedelcu, 2017; Nedelcu & Wyss, 2019; Plaza, 2000; Schröder-Butterfill & Schonheinz, 2019; Sun, 2021; Treas, 2008). However, much of this work including journal special issues and edited books published on ageing and migration to date 1 has considered ageing and migration mainly in ‘Western’ societies. 2 These publications also tend to focus on the care strategies of/for older adults in the present. 3 Drawing synergy from emergent research on futures/futurity, this special issue argues instead that it is equally important to give attention to how older adults anticipate and manage their futures. This includes how they develop preparedness and resilience through a variety of strategies, including migration.
Futurity does not only refer to a temporal domain; rather, the study of futures can also be deployed as an analytical tool (Adelson, 2013), facilitating the critical examination of how depictions of the future become more than an object of thought, but a problem requiring diagnosis and solutions (such as through migration). In this regard, although ageing is often regarded as a life stage with limited prospects for the future, this special issue reveals how older adults’ experiences of ageing and perceptions of ageing futures impact both their life plans as well as those of their caregivers before, during or after migration. By focusing on how the Asian region functions as both source and destination sites for ageing-related migration, the papers in this special issue collectively foreground the interlinked aspects of different types and phases of migration, and how they matter in shaping older adults’ and caregivers’ care practices in the present, as well as in anticipation of ageing futures.
(Re)constructing Ageing Futures
The literature on futures/futurity has given considerable attention to human subjects such as children, youths, young families, and irregular and labour migrants (e.g. Boccagni, 2017; Crivello, 2015; Khoo & Yeoh, 2017; Naafs & Skelton, 2018; Pimlott-Wilson, 2017; Robertson et al., 2018). Across these studies, futures are associated with risks, uncertainty and anxiety but also hopeful imaginations of what could be possible and different degrees of individuals’ agency (Bunnell et al., 2017). Yet, what has been neglected in studies of the future/futurity are the experiences and hopes of older adults, presumably because ageing is often regarded as decline towards the end-of-life rather than a life stage where anticipation of or hopes for the future still matter. Through this special issue, we argue that how older adults experience the ‘presence of the future’ and undertake ‘anticipatory practices’ (Anderson, 2010: 783) deserve critical investigation too. The papers in the special issue show that older adults continue to actively prospect ways of enhancing their ability to age well and/or with dignity, even as they often balance this aspiration alongside family needs as well as issues of personal health, finance and other constraints. They navigate their futures by creatively combining the various resources available to them in particular spaces (including across countries) and at particular times (including across life-stages). Navigating futures through migration, however, can result in new challenges in the future.
On the one hand, migration enables some older adults to reverse the social constraints they experience in their home countries. By moving to less economically advanced countries, they can improve their consumption power (see Johnston and Pratt, and Toyota, this issue), or leverage the labour of migrant care workers to enhance their access to care (see Huang et al., this issue). On the other hand, some of these older adults may subsequently encounter other constraints resulting from political-legal regulations over visas, periods of stay as well as access to social welfare and healthcare protection (see Amrith, this special issue). For non-migrant family caregivers of older adults, the migration of other family members can exacerbate family stress, particularly when the frailty needs of the care recipient increase (see Sun and Cao, this issue). While discussions of alternative futures (e.g. long-distance care or better quality care abroad) may be facilitated by digital and travel technologies (see Baldassar and Wilding, this issue), the ability of older migrants and non-migrants to leverage on such technologies is highly dependent on institutional and family support.
Other than demonstrating how futurity can be used as an analytical lens for research on ageing, this special issue also brings to view how analyses of ageing futures need to be conceptualised in their (changing) social and cultural contexts, including but not limited to aspects of care, familyhood and reciprocity. Existing research on ageing and migration typically focuses on European and North American cases, whereas the papers in our special issue provide a distinctive focus on migration in/from Asia, while also acknowledging that ‘Western’ societies such as Australia are transitioning to multicultural settings reflecting ageing concerns of a range of migrant populations including those from Asia. The special issue draws together international research on older and younger migrations from the Global North and South, showing how ageing migrants influence the societies they move to as they form the transnational ties linking the current and future lives of migrants and non-migrants. It also demonstrates how culturally distinctive moral economies of familyhood and ageing in/of Asia (e.g. notions of horizontal and hierarchical reciprocity or respect for elders) extend across borders to impact the way that older adults and/or their caregivers perceive their futures. In turn, their perception of futures influences whether they take pre-emptive action to negotiate both constraints and opportunities.
The Collection
The first paper in the special issue by Shirlena Huang and her co-authors discusses how stay-behind Singaporean older adults negotiate their emotions and care expectations of their children residing in Singapore vis-à-vis those who live abroad, in terms of proximate and distant care. In their discussion of current and anticipated care futures, the authors highlight the importance of not ‘conflating spatio-temporal proximity with the experience of care-full practices and distance with care-less ones’, thus destabilising oft-held assumptions of proximate care as better. This paper sets the stage for the second paper by Ken Chih-Yuan Sun and Xuemei Cao who develop the themes of emotions and family intimacies by considering how caregivers for stay-behind parents in China perceive the contributions and closeness of family members who are internal or international migrants. This paper thus investigates the interlinkages between international and internal migration, two domains which are normally considered separately in the migration literature.
The third paper by Baldassar, Stevens and Wilding examines how, depending on the level of digital proficiency, ‘being together’ across distance is experienced differently by two distinct cohorts of Chinese grandparents who are ageing in Australia. The authors suggest that the younger cohort is able to sustain long-distance relationships through digital kinning and homing practices that enable them to preserve their identities as they advance to later age. This argument underlines the importance of supporting digital literacy and capabilities among older adults, especially if they are migrants and ageing in a foreign land. Continuing the theme of care support, the next paper by Johnston and Pratt considers the care strategies and anticipatory action taken by older migrants who have moved from the Global North to Thailand to benefit from more affordable paid care provided by locals. Johnston and Pratt argue that these types of care migration could create unanticipated opportunities for Thai care workers, particularly transgender and Indigenous people who would be otherwise marginalised within mainstream Thai society. The paper adds much needed nuance and complexity to otherwise simplistic depictions that associate the Global South with victimisation and the Global North with exploitation.
In contrast to the options exercised by middle-class migrants, the penultimate paper by Mika Toyota examines the case of Japanese single, low-income elderly men who migrated to Thailand because of the lower cost of living there. Her paper reveals how these low-status men, who have internalised a masculinist ideology of self-reliance during their working lives, end up becoming socially withdrawn because of low self-esteem associated with the loss of work status. Migration to Thailand, Toyota argues, is motivated by an anticipation that they would be stigmatised in the Japanese society as they age. Paradoxically, they continue to socially isolate themselves in Thailand and slip towards lonely futures. The final paper by Megha Amrith moves the focus to older migrants who have less choice in how they navigate anticipations of/for care in the future. Although they provide care for Singaporean families, the ageing Filipino domestic workers in Amrith’s study do not have the right to remain in the long-term under Singapore’s immigration and labour laws. This study reveals the limits of transnational social protection (Levitt et al., 2017) for temporary labour migrants, both in the host and sending nations. In closing the special issue, these two papers raise the question of whose lives are valued or devalued in transnational fields of care. Migration could become a means to better ageing prospects for some, while deferring pressing questions of whose ageing futures could be compromised as a result of such endeavours.
Conclusion
Ageing futures need to be taken seriously as a topic of both empirical and conceptual treatment, as well as for potential policy interventions. Collectively, the six papers in this special issue generate new insights for how migration matters in the future-oriented thinking and planning of older adults and their caregivers. The papers illuminate how everyday processes in the present lead to anticipatory action for ageing futures. Rather than adopt a teleological approach, the special issue’s focus on ageing futures denaturalises the category of ‘future’ by prompting readers to reflect on how older adults and their caregivers socially construct possible futures and take action to create or avoid those outcomes. Our interest in Asian migration and societies provides a window into analysing not only how cultural contexts matter during ageing. We also highlight the importance of considering the power relations and inequalities that exist between migrants and their societies, as well as across generations (both kin and non-kin), gender, class and occupational profiles, and countries, during the (re)construction of ageing futures.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study is supported by Ministry of Education Singapore Academic Research Fund Tier 2 (MOET2017-T2-019).
Notes
Author Biographies