Ageing and Migration in a Global Context Challenges for Welfare States

This book brings together two major trends influencing economic and social life: population ageing on the one side, and migration on the other. Both have assumed increasing importance over the course of the 20th and into the 21st century.  The book offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on the challenges posed by the globalisation of the life course to welfare states’ old age and family policies.  Through a variety of case studies, it covers a wide range of migration scenarios: those who migrate in later life; migrants from earlier years who age in place; and old people who hire migrant caregivers. It shows how both local and global economic inequalities intersect to frame interactions between ageing, migration, and family support. Across a wide variety of situations, it highlights that migration can both create risks for older people, but also serve as an answer to ageing-related social, economic, and health risks. The book explores tensions between national andglobal contexts in experiences of migration across the life course. As such this book offers a fascinating read to scholars, students, practitioners, and policy makers in the fields of aging, migration, life course, and population health. 

Introduction.- Part 1: Support and Care of Immigrants Ageing in Place.- 1. Migration, transnational ties and intergenerational support: constructions of home and family life.- 2.Invisible old age: ethnography of a soup kitchen in Switzerland.- 3.Between care and contract: ageing immigrants, self-appointed helpers and ambiguous belonging in the Danish welfare state.- 4.Contexts of migration, integration and welfare configurations: The case of Romanian older migrants in Switzerland.- 5.Care of elderly parents in transnational families.- Part 2:  Migration as a Response to Support and Care Challenges of Ageing.- 6.    Dependence and Retirement Migration: The Importance of Inequalities.- 7.Linked lives, dividing borders: From transnational solidarity to family reunification of an older parent.- 8.Anticipating retirement in the context of migration: The case of Peruvians in Switzerland.- 9.Elders moving between Turkey and Germany.- 10. Migration and the welfare state’s life-course model in the Global North: A Swiss illustration.- 11.Migrantship in a public debate on elder care: making sense of media representations with the ethics of care lens.- Conclusion.

Marion Repetti has a PhD in sociology. She is a professor at the School of Social Work of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland Valais-Wallis where she is also head of the Social Work Research Institute. She studies social policies, ageing, inequalities and welfare states. She is particularly interested in ways that the globalisation of the life-course and of the capitalist economy challenge nation-based welfare states. In addition to her book, Les figures de la vieillesse, she has published in such international journals as Gerontology and Society, the Journal of Population Ageing, and Sociological Research Online.

Toni Calasanti, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech, where she is also a faculty affiliate of both the Center for Gerontology. Her research on the intersections of age, gender and social inequalities has appeared in several journals in aging and sociology as well as in the books Gender, Social Inequalities, and Aging (2001), Age Matters: Re-Aligning Feminist Thinking (2006), and Nobody’s Burden: Lessons from the Great Depression on the Struggle for Old-Age Security (2011).  Recent explorations of the intersectional approach and of age, gender and sexuality appear in Handbook of Theories of Aging (2nd ed.) and the Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, and lay the foundation for her present research on same-sex partner caregiving.

Professor Chris Phillipson is a sociologist and former Director of the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing (MICRA), based at the University of Manchester (UK). He has worked on a range of projects relating to social exclusion and ageing, work and retirement, globalisation and ageing, and age-friendly cities. He is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and a Past-President of the British Society of Gerontology. He has published a number of books in the field of ageing as well as numerous research papers. He is currently involved with research projects investigating the transition from work to retirement, isolation in later life, and developing age-friendly urban environments.