Deploying an ageing-astute lens in migration studies: Current research and future directions

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 migration is primarily a phenomenon of younger adulthood. It is only in the last two decades that migration studies have moved beyond a singular focus on migrants in younger adulthood and childhood, and an ageist bias arguably remains in large swathes of migration policy, for example in relation to education, employability, language classes, and citizenship requirements, all of which are geared towards the profiles of young-adult migrants ‘as if such matters were beyond the interests and capacities of older migrants’ (Katz & Grenier, 2023: 18). Scholarship has emerged to redress this skewed perception of who migrants are and when migration occurs, beginning in the late 1990s with research on (relatively privileged) international retirement migrants (IRM), a field summarised by King and Cela (2023), who note that definitional and measurement complexities hinder quantification of retirement migration, a problem which also applies to other late-life migration categories such as return and circular migration (Hunter, 2023). As a result, much of the research on IRM—and other categories at the intersection of migration and ageing—is of a qualitative nature and reliant on case studies of specific origin groups at a single moment in time. Hence the call from multiple researchers for more cross-national quantitative studies (see e.g. Fokkema, this issue), including comparisons between migrant and non-migrant older people (e.g. Cela & Barbiano di Belgiojoso, 2023, on health and well-being).

Research also notes the sheer diversity between and within groups of older migrants, encompassing ‘some of the most deprived and socially excluded, and some of the most affluent and accomplished’ in society (Warnes et al., 2004: 307). By attending to relative privilege as well as older migrants' capacity for agency, the Handbook on Migration and Ageing presents a counter-point to the ‘vulnerability trope’ (King et al., 2017) which has characterised much, although by no means all, of the scholarly production on older migrants. The current and projected growth and diversification of older migrant populations merits attention from policymakers given its implications for the planning, funding and delivery of interventions in a range of areas including pensions, income support, health services and social care (Torres & Hunter, 2023). Furthermore, the immigration of eldercare workers to keep pace with the growing (and increasingly diverse) older population is likely to remain a structural feature of economic relations between the Global North and Global South for the foreseeable future (Kilkey, 2023). There are also implications for policymakers in terms of the theoretical underpinnings guiding their interventions in this area, such as ideas of ‘successful ageing’ and ‘age-friendly’ cities. Policies for older adults are often predicated on gerontological notions of continuity and ageing-in-place, but these conceptual frameworks now need to be re-imagined in light of the growing proportions of the older population who have experienced geographical discontinuity and multiple places during the life course (Torres & Hunter, 2023). In sum, gerontologists understand very well the life course as a general construct, but there is less awareness as to what a migratory life course could entail. To assist policymakers and practitioners to formulate and implement interventions to meet the needs of older migrants, collective efforts are required on the part of researchers, both migration scholars and gerontologists, to foreground what we refer to as migrancy-astuteness.

To stimulate such efforts, we present here the broad lines of a research agenda at the nexus of migration studies and gerontology, leveraging insights from both fields in a spirt of intellectual cross-pollination. Our first suggestion is for migration scholars to embrace more systematically the life course approach developed by social gerontologists over the last five decades, and now foundational in most social scientific work on ageing (Elder, 1974). A life course approach would serve as an analytical and methodological framework to chart how migratory experience, or migrancy, impacts on individuals over time, and also how it impacts on their networks of kin and acquaintances through the life course concept of ‘linked lives’. Longitudinal methodologies informed by the life course perspective could help us understand causal links across a number of pressing questions, such as the paradoxical relationships observed between health and migration over time (e.g. older migrants' mortality advantage but morbidity disadvantage compared to non-migrants, see Cela & Barbiano di Belgiojoso, 2023); the dynamics of relocation decisions and how these are affected by life course transitions such as parenthood, grand-parenthood or retirement (Hunter, 2023; Liversage & Mizrahi Mirdal, 2017); and the accumulation of economic advantage or disadvantage over the migratory life course (Gubernskaya & Dobreva, 2023). Such longitudinal, life course-informed studies would also help policy makers design social policy interventions to mitigate the accumulation of disadvantage in earlier adulthood and midlife (i.e. before it is too late), in contrast to typical social policy prescriptions for older people which are focused narrowly on old age as the last stage of life (Walker, 2018). In this regard, longitudinal research with migrants in midlife would be especially valuable, given that this is a time of life when patterns of cumulative advantage or disadvantage become more evident (Infurna et al., 2020). The midlife period is generally under-researched, and particular gaps have been identified in relation to its intersection with diverse identification grounds such as migrancy (Lulle, 2024), race, ethnicity and sexuality (Infurna et al., 2020).

Our second suggestion is for gerontologists to pay closer attention to migrancy as an axis of social stratification in later life, intersecting with—but differentiated from—ethnicity and race, which are the explanatory variables gerontologists typically reach for. A recent editorial in the Journals of Gerontology: Series B, notes how ‘being a racialized minority and an immigrant can be a double burden (…) Combining scholarship on discrimination and immigration could help us understand better the lived experiences of older immigrants’ (Kelley et al., 2024: 3). To date, however, there has been an absence of attention to older migrants' experiences of racism, and the ways in which such experiences impact other angles of investigation that gerontologists are preoccupied with (such as quality of life, well-being and loneliness to name but a few), as Torres (2023) has demonstrated. Furthermore, there is rich potential to distinguish racialisation effects from migrancy effects via age-matched comparisons between first-generation migrants and the descendants of migrants who are racialised in similar ways (see also Yurdakul, 2024). Analysing race/ethnicity and migrancy as separate (but often interacting) variables will only become more necessary in future decades with more and more ethno-racialised minorities attaining middle- and later life who are not migrants but rather the descendants of those who migrated and settled (Hunter, 2018; see also Fargues, this issue). Equally necessary is a reflexive approach which turns the analytical gaze back on us as researchers and how, through our academic production, we may be inadvertently perpetuating the racialisation of populations whom we hope to empower (Torres, 2023).

Finally, of potentially wider import to migration studies and debates about methodological nationalism in the social sciences more generally (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002), the ageing-migration nexus offers case studies on a phase of the life course where the ‘container nation-state’ arguably holds less sway than earlier periods. As recent research demonstrates, at a certain age, freed from the geographic bounds of earlier life course stages (e.g. socialisation in national education systems; employment tied to a fixed location; child-rearing), some (although not all) later life individuals have a certain latitude in where and how they live their lives. Private pensions, for those lucky to benefit from them, may be transferable to another jurisdiction where taxes on retirement income may be more favourable, and where the cost of living may be lower. Publicly provided pensions are also exportable where bi- or multi-lateral conventions allow. ‘Geographic arbitrage’ (Hayes, 2014) can likewise be employed to access more favourable housing or health care, and such discerning practices are not only the domain of (relatively privileged) lifestyle migrants, but potentially also labour migrants and other categories (e.g. Horn, 2023; Sun, 2021). Studies on inclusion in different social systems such as these, at transnational and global scales, offer empirical ground for operationalising alternative understandings of ‘society’ which move beyond methodological nationalism and organicist ‘whole-parts’ dichotomies which have dominated understandings of immigrant integration (Favell, 2019; see also Bolzman, 2023). Future research on the ageing-migration nexus should also be mindful of how concepts like integration and society are not necessarily universalist but rather rooted historically in relations of domination (Schinkel, 2018). Thus, perspectives of migration scholarship from the Global South are essential to help free the social scientific imagination on the ageing-migration nexus conceptually and theoretically, for example in relation to alternative understandings of welfare and migration regimes (Kilkey, 2023). By showcasing how demographic ageing is changing the age composition of migrant populations across the world, and signposting what is known and what remains to be researched, scholarship at the ageing-migration nexus ultimately proposes two take-home messages: that gerontology should leverage a migrancy-astute lens in addition to its customary framings of ethnicity and race; and vice versa, that migration studies should deploy an ageing-astute lens in order to reap the analytical benefits of a life course imaginary.

The opinions expressed in this Commentary are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors, Editorial Board, International Organization for Migration nor John Wiley & Sons.