CAARNet (Care & Ageing in Asia Research Network)

Echoes + Edges

At the threshold of care and critique

From Workers to Dependents: What Happens When Migrant Caregivers Grow Old?
Shubhangi Ahuja
Graduate, BA. (Hons.) Sociology, Jindal School of Liberal Arts & Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University, India

July 2026

Every morning, migrant care workers worldwide begin their day by preparing meals, bathing older adults, or helping children get ready for school. This labour is intimate, physically demanding, and emotionally sustained over years, often decades. Many people take up care work due to limited economic opportunities in their home countries. Broader global inequalities then compel them to migrate, making transnational care labour a strategy for survival and family responsibility. Yet one question remains unanswered: what happens to migrant caregivers as they age?

In wealthier nations, migrant caregivers– predominantly women and often from Asian communities- have become central to childcare and eldercare systems. Research across Europe and North America shows that migrant labour fills persistent shortages in long-term care, enabling households to function and older populations to age in place (von Hooren, 2014). Despite their indispensability, care work remains undervalued, informal, and poorly protected. In this article, I also attempt to show how cumulative disadvantage shapes later life.

As caregivers age into their 60s and 70s, many face precarious futures. Years of low wages and informal employment often translate into limited pension eligibility, inadequate access to healthcare, and continued dependence on employers for legal status. Aging, in this context, is not simply biological but is socially structured by migration regimes and welfare systems that rarely anticipate migrant caregivers as long-term residents.

Empirical research shows how precarity unfolds across workers’ lives. Studies on Filipina live-in caregivers in Canada highlight how temporary visas, delayed family reunification, and demanding work schedules create cumulative disadvantage over time (Kelly, 2011). As caregivers age or face illness, their access to healthcare and permanent residency often becomes uncertain, underscoring that their labour is valued mainly while it remains productive. (Kelly, 2011).

Similar patterns appear in Southern Europe. Ethnographic research in Spain and Italy shows that migrant eldercare workers frequently remain in physically strenuous roles well into older age because they lack pension contributions or fear losing legal status if they exit employment (Anderson, 2025). Retirement, in these contexts, is not a protected phase of life but a period of vulnerability and waiting.

The experience of aging migrant caregivers is further shaped by immigration policy systems. In the United States, sociological research describes a persistent “climate of deportability” created by immigration enforcement, affecting even long-term residents (De Genova, 2002). Studies show that older migrants with insecure status often delay seeking healthcare or social services due to fear of exposure, worsening health outcomes over time (Castañeda et al., 2015). For aging caregivers, this fear quietly shapes everyday decisions– whether to seek medical help, request for reduction in working hours, or rely on public/government institutions for support.

In the United Kingdom, academic analyses of the social care sector highlight how employer-tied visas and restricted settlement pathways create dependency and instability for migrant care workers (Burns et al., 2021). As caregivers age, continued employment becomes tied not only to income but to the right to remain in the country, leaving little room to withdraw from physically demanding work even when health declines.

From an urban sociology perspective, these experiences reveal a broader contradiction. Cities rely heavily on migrant caregivers to sustain everyday life- enabling dualincome households, compensating for underfunded public care systems, and supporting aging populations. Yet research consistently shows that aging migrants face barriers to accessing urban welfare systems, including language obstacles, eligibility restrictions, and social isolation. Systematic barriers accumulate over time and shape later life for such migrant caregivers. Years of precarious work result in limited entitlements just as health needs increase, exposing structural gaps in care regimes that rely on migrant labour without extending long-term protection.

As a sociology graduate moving toward urban studies, I find that aging migrant caregivers bring questions of care, belonging, and responsibility into sharp focus. Care is treated as essential, even moral, yet those who provide it across borders are rarely incorporated into lasting frameworks of security. When migrant caregivers grow old, they do not suddenly become burdens, rather, their aging reveals the long-term costs of systems that extract care without ensuring dignity in return.

Ultimately, asking who cares for the caregivers is not a rhetorical gesture. It invites a closer interrogation of how migration regimes and transnational labour markets distribute care, risk, and recognition across the life course. For migrant caregivers, precarity is shaped not only by the undervaluation of care work but also by the conditions of working abroad- temporary legal status, restricted mobility, separation from family, and limited access to welfare in host countries. These intersecting dynamics reveal how both care and migration structures determine whose aging is secured and whose remains vulnerable, and whose lives are deemed worthy of long-term protection.

References

Anderson, B. (2025). Introduction: Rethinking Migration – Challenging Borders, Citizenship and Race. In Rethinking Migration (pp. 1-20). Bristol University Press Digital.

Burns R., Zhang, C. X., Patel, P., Eley, I., Campos-Matos, I., & Aldridge, R. W. (2021). Migration health research in the United Kingdom: A scoping review. Journal of migration and health, 4, 100061.

Castañeda H., Holmes, S. M., Madrigal, D. S., Young, M. E. D., Beyeler, N., & Quesada, J. (2015). Immigration as a social determinant of health. Annu Rev Public Health, 36(1), 375-392.

De Genova, N. P. (2002). Migrant “illegality” and deportability in everyday life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, 419-447. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/4132887

Kelly, P. F. (2011). Migration, agrarian transition, and rural change in Southeast Asia: Introduction. Critical Asian Studies. 43(4), 479-506.

Van Hooren, F. (2014). Migrant care work in Europe: Variety and institutional determinants. In The transformation of care in European societies (pp. 62-82). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.