International Migration最新文献

This article analyses the impact of the crises on the level of inequality between native and migrant origin children in twenty-first-century Spain. We use microdata from the Spanish Labour Force Survey (2000–2022) to study the risk for migrant and native children of living in a household with no working adults. We hypothesize that the assimilation of the immigrant population—after more than two decades in the country—might have contributed to reducing the impact of the COVID-19 crisis. Results show that the 2008 crisis substantially increased the gap between migrant and native children, while the impact of the pandemic has been milder. Moreover, social origin has a stronger protective effect for native children compared with children with a migrant background, especially during periods of economic downturn. However, we find that among children of low social origin, migrant children are less likely to live in a household with no working adults.

In respect of international migration, some 281 million people were estimated to live outside their country of origin as of 2020, roughly equivalent to the population of Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous country (UNDESA, 2020b). Bringing both demographic drivers into focus, 9.3% of the global population are aged over 65, yet migrants aged 65+ comprise 12.3% of the world's international migrant stock (equivalent to 34 million people) (Kelley et al., 2024). According to a joint report by the OECD and European Commission, ‘elderly migrants are a growing group of concern (…) Foreign-born populations are getting older in most OECD and EU countries’ (OECD/European Commission, 2023: 152; see also Fargues, this issue, for a detailed discussion on similar trends in the MENA region).

As with population trends, so with research trends. Academic interest in the intersection of migration and ageing has grown considerably since scholars first began to explore this terrain in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Sayad, 2001; Warnes et al., 2004), part of a broader recognition of the diversification and globalisation of international migration at this time, as exemplified in the leading textbook The Age of Migration, now in its sixth edition (de Haas et al., 2020). The commission by Edward Elgar Press of the Handbook on Migration and Ageing, which we co-edited (Torres & Hunter, 2023), is validation that research at the intersection of migration and ageing is by now sufficiently consolidated to warrant its first reference work.

In organising and structuring the handbook, we departed from the ageing-migration nexus framework proposed by King et al. (2017). A nexus approach proposes a holistic view of ageing and migration as ‘entwined trajectories’ (ibid: 182), expanding the range of actors who are implicated in this field beyond the purview of older migrants per se, notwithstanding the heterogeneity observed in these populations. Thus, the ageing-migration nexus also draws attention to, for example, older people ‘left behind’ by migrating family members (Lenoël, 2023), as well as the large proportion of migrant workers (often female) employed in the eldercare industry in countries of the Global North (Amrith, 2023).

Our entry point is to present the key concepts within migration studies and gerontology that form the basis for scholarship at the intersection of ageing and migration. The notion of the life course is central here, and gerontologists Katz and Grenier (2023: 14) argue that ‘life course research advances studies of migration and ageing by illustrating how human stories and their varying pathways are situated across multiple places and points in time’, thereby offering a corrective to long-held assumptions (in policy circles and public discourse more widely) that migrati

Older migrants have long been an overlooked population (Fokkema & Ciobanu, 2021). While gerontological research has a rather colour-blind history, migration research has predominantly focused on younger migrant populations (e.g., recent newcomers and second-generation). Especially in longstanding immigration countries, older migrants today represent a substantial segment of the ageing population (OECD/European Union, 2023), and their numbers are expected to increase significantly in the near future (Apt, 2018; also see Fargues this issue). There is also growing awareness of the specific vulnerabilities of older migrants arising from the intersection of ageing and migration (Ciobanu et al., 2017). As a result, research on older migrants has gained momentum in recent years, encompassing a wide array of topics (see Torres and Hunter (2023) and the commentary in this issue for a nice illustration of this).

One of the vulnerabilities faced by older migrants is loneliness – the perceived discrepancy between the quality and/or quantity of an individual's actual and desired social relationships (Peplau & Perlman, 1982). Quantitative studies to date show, almost without exception, that older migrants on average report substantially higher levels of loneliness compared with their native-born counterparts (Dolberg et al., 2016; Fokkema & Naderi, 2013; Lin et al., 2016; Uysal-Bozkir et al., 2017; van Tilburg & Fokkema, 2021; Wu & Penning, 2015). When older migrants are further differentiated by ethnicity, those from countries of origin with greater cultural and linguistic distance are particularly prone to experiencing above-average levels of loneliness. In Great Britain, for instance, older migrants from India showed a loneliness prevalence similar to that of the native-born (8% versus 9%), whereas it was much higher for older migrants from the Caribbean (24%) and even more so for those from Bangladesh (40%), China (40%), Pakistan (50%), and Africa (50%) (Victor et al., 2012). In Canada, older migrants are on average lonelier than their native-born age peers, except for those who migrated from Britain or France (de Jong Gierveld et al., 2015) and identify themselves as British or French (Wu & Penning, 2015).

Addressing loneliness, especially when it becomes chronic, is paramount due to its detrimental effects on physical and mental health. Prolonged loneliness increases the risk of health issues such as cardiovascular disease, accelerated cognitive decline, dementia, depression, anxiety disorders, and even premature all-cause mortality (Cachón-Alonso et al., 2023; Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015; Holwerda et al., 2014; Park et al., 2020). Loneliness may also lead to unhealthy coping