Introduction to the Special Issue: “Transnational Family Care ‘On Hold’? Intergenerational Relationships and Obligations in the Context of Immobility Regimes”

Introduction: transnational family care ‘on hold’?

This special issue explores how members of transnational families manage their intergenerational care obligations in the context of increasing restrictions to cross–border mobility. We ask: How do limits on mobility impact on transnational intergenerational family care relations?

It is now well established in the transnational family literature that despite geographic separation, members of transnational families maintain a feeling of collective welfare and unity, of “familyhood” (Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002). This connectedness is built up and sustained through the intergenerational exchange of a range of care and support practices, including those between adult migrants and their aging parents (e.g., Baldassar et al., 2007) and those between parents and their dependent children (e.g., Madianou & Miller, 2012). When considered across the life course, it becomes clear that these intergenerational exchanges are reciprocal (Finch & Mason, 1993), but also uneven circulations of care between family members (Baldassar & Merla, 2014). It is rare that kin will objectively measure their specific contributions or gains from the care that is given, received and circulated (Olwig, 2007). Rather, family members develop a ‘feeling’ for when their contributions are undervalued or might exceed what is likely to be returned (Wilding, 2018). These feelings are informed by gendered and generational role expectations, such as those of the ‘loyal and dutiful daughter’ or the ‘selfless, doting grandmother’ (e.g., Zhou, 2012), as well as by the density of the kin network, and the role of extended family members (e.g., Baldassar & Brandhorst, 2020; Brandhorst, 2015). They in turn inform the extent to which individual family members feel compelled to contribute to the rituals, demands and maintenance of familyhood (Olwig, 2002).

Because transnational care takes place, by definition, across distance, research has focused on the important role of information and communication technologies (ICTs), which allow people to experience new forms of co-presence and ‘being there’ for each other (Baldassar et al., 2016; Wilding, 2006). In this way, transnational family research has challenged the notion that care and intergenerational relationships have to be geographically close or require physical co-presence. Yet, the capacity for mobility remains an important underpinning of transnational family life. Even though physical proximity may not be necessary or sufficient to sustain a sense of familyhood, it nevertheless remains a goal and implicit preference (Skrbis, 2008). Thus, access to mobility and the opportunity to be physically co-present, whether through visits, repatriations or migration, remains an integral feature of transnational family care routines (Baldassar et al., 2007; Merla et al., 2020a). It is in this sense that attention to the impact of immobility regimes becomes an essential object of transnational family studies. As this Special Issue demonstrates, immobility regimes illuminate the limits of transnational care, and illustrate the ongoing role of mobility in facilitating transnational intergenerational relationships. Indeed, the importance of opportunities for physical co-presence have been highlighted by the impact of Covid-19 travel restrictions on all families across the globe, whether transnational or not. Although not the focus of our Special Issue, this global context adds a new relevance to the lessons that the transnational families’ literature delivers on the role of mobility and physical co-presence in intergenerational family care relations.

The recent focus on immobility regimes and border regimes has emerged from what has long been argued: that access to mobility is one of the sharpest stratifying dimensions of our age (Bauman, 1998; Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013; Shamir, 2005; Turner, 2010). As mobility has become more ubiquitous, so too has differential access to mobility become ever more complex. Obstacles such as the lack of financial resources are only one of the factors at play, with governments across the world responding to growing rates of temporary and permanent migration with heightened securitization discourses that are enacted through increasingly restrictive migration policies and border controls (Hess & Kasparek, 2017; Huysmans, 2000; Koslowski, 2005; Walters, 2008). The current Covid-19 pandemic further exacerbates this increasing immobility by a closure of national borders, curfews and worldwide international travel restrictions (Perret et al., 2020), challenging regional integration projects. In Europe, internal border controls in the Schengen area have been imposed in the context of Covid-19 even more profoundly than at the peak of the ‘European refugee crisis’ in 2015 (Brady, 2020). In the context of the fear of contagion, international mobility has been even more strongly framed as a threat to national security (Brumat, 2020);

The global lock-down associated with the fight against Covid-19 has transformed the privileges, power, violence and hierarchies of im/mobility. The capacity to be immobile, by ‘staying at home’ is both premised upon, and has radically different embodied consequences depending on articulations of age, class, gender, racialization, migration/residency status and dis/ability. (Schling et al., 2020, p. 1)

In response to increasingly restrictive migration policies and closed borders, there has been a growing call to examine the resulting ‘immobility regimes’ (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013; Shamir, 2005) and the relations of power that underpin them. Limits to mobility not only impact migrants and, in particular, refugees; they also have negative consequences for their transnational family members, including those who do not themselves migrate. Merla et al. (2020a) point to the impact of ‘immobilizing regimes of migration’ on transnational families, which include:

the combination of state immigration policies around migrants’ entry, settlement and social, economic and political incorporation, as well as hegemonic constructions of migrants and migration. These immobilizing regimes block the physical mobility of some, while granting highly conditional mobility to others, resulting in situations of enforced and permanent temporariness and ontological insecurity. (Merla et al 2020b, pp. 15–16).

This Special Issue extends Merla et al (2020b) focus on the impact of ‘immobility regimes’ to highlight transnational intergenerational care practices, exploring how migration restrictions and closed borders can ‘slow down’ or ‘put on hold’ intergenerational care and family life across borders. The papers present the perspectives of different family members, both migrants and ‘stay-behinds’, from across the generations and family life course, which foreground the socio-relational and cultural dimensions of care exchange. The contributions explore case studies from different parts of the world including Asia, Southeast-Asia, Australia, Latin America, North America and Europe. Not surprisingly, they feature the groups most affected by immobility, including, refugees, exiles, undocumented migrants and retirement migrants. They also explore a range of transnational intergenerational care constellations, including migrant mothers caring for their adult migrant children abroad, migrant children caring for their aging parents in the home country, and aging migrants staying connected with their children in the homeland. The analyzes of transnational intergenerational care strategies in the context of immobility provide novel perspectives on the different forms of care practices, strategies and costs involved.

In this introduction, we begin with an overview of the five papers that comprise this special issue, followed by a discussion of the key themes and issues they raise. These themes highlight the changing obligations inherent in intergenerational relationships between children, parents and grandparents across the life cycle, in particular the impact of aging and aged care obligations, and the gendered nature and cultural dimensions of care. We conclude with reflections from the study of intergenerational family care and immobility that might inform the study of family care in the current Covid-pandemic.

Overview of the articles

The impacts of ‘(im)mobility regimes’ (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013; Shamir, 2005) and ‘border regimes’ are especially evident in the case of refugees who have to deal with several overlapping limits on their mobility including restrictive visas, the confines of refugee camps, sedentarist policies of resettlement as well as insufficient economic means (Tazzioli & Garelli, 2018). Undocumented migrants are similarly particularly vulnerable, without a visa, in constant fear of deportation, without access to labor rights, health care and other social services. They cannot travel, as this would presuppose the risk of being discovered, deported or denied reentry. Undocumented migrants are stigmatized, isolated, and immobilized. In the context of Covid-19, undocumented migrants often live in poor, overcrowded and marginal sites that may not be offered the same health interventions as the rest of the population. So, how do refugees and undocumented migrants cope with these restrictions of mobility and their obligations of transnational care? How do they deal with their situation of vulnerability in the context of intergenerational care?

Dora Sampaio explores in her contribution, how undocumented Brazilian migrants in the United States use the practices of ‘sieving’ and ‘curating’ in talking about their lives in the US to manage the information they share with their aging parents back in Brazil. She draws on a conceptual discussion of silence and ‘communication voids’ to interpret the processes through which migrants present their life abroad as ‘fairer’ or ‘more idealized’ to their parents in the home country. The migrants avoid telling their aging parents in Brazil about their daily tensions, poor housing conditions and fear of deportation and financial situations in order not to upset them. These practices of omission are strategies used to shield aging, and often vulnerable, parents back home. The sieving, or filtering and curating of information that is transmitted during transnational communication is heightened under conditions of immobility, when there is additional emotional strain caused by not knowing when family members will be reunited. Sampaio maintains that in order to understand intergenerational care giving we need to pay closer attention to what is ‘silenced’ during transnational care practices and conversations, suggesting that silence is often enacted as a care practice. She stresses the need for the study of transnational care to include the analysis of silence and silencing as forms of care provision.

In showing the relevance of silence as a transnational care practice, this article widens the focus of existing work on transnational care, which tends to focus on financial (remittances), hands-on care, material support and spoken dimensions of care (practical and emotional support). This perspective on silence as a transnational care practice proves particularly relevant in the analysis of contexts of vulnerability such as those caused by current (im)mobility regimes. It also opens avenues for future research that broadens the analysis of transnational communication to both adult children and aging parents to better understand the mutual use and understandings of silence and sieving as care practices. Sampaio’s study further shows the importance of religious and spiritual coping strategies in the context of distant family care and with loneliness resulting from transnational ‘communication voids’ and insecure circumstances of undocumented migrants. In the context of forced sedentarism and the strain associated with the immobility regime, religion offers an important coping resource.

As with refugees and undocumented migrants, immobility regimes have especially harsh consequences on people living in exile. The experience of exile and the persisting ruptures with the country of origin can be a further barrier that impedes transnational care, including the motivation and willingness to engage in transnational family care and support. In her article on older East Timorese living in exile in rural Indonesia and their relatives in East Timor, Victoria Sakti explores how intergenerational care is constrained by border regimes and in particular by imaginary boundaries in conflict-riven communities. The article shows how the pressures of life in exile shape the ways transnational families organize, prioritize and fulfill care expectations that are central to their sense of belonging and identity. In doing so, she sheds light on withholding care and on the asymmetries entailed in intergenerational relationships. In addition, she discusses how uneven power relations of border regimes shape the exchange of care (or not) between (aging) parents and (grand)children across national borders. Sakti argues that the forms of immobility, withholding or limiting caregiving can transcend physical boundaries, and include the social and emotional boundaries communities in conflict build against one another over time. Sakti’s analysis of these ‘imaginary’ borders/boundaries in the provision of care sensitizes us to the withholding of care in the study of transnational families and leads us to consider the additional asymmetries entailed in precarious familial relations and the role of imaginary boundaries in the study of ‘hard’ border regimes.

In contrast to the hard borders (imagined or otherwise) of the exile, borders of a much more intimate nature are common to the experience of aging, which can reduce personal mobility to the extent that people can become exiles from their own bodies. The reduced mobility that often accompanies bodily aging is increasingly reinforced by restrictive migration policy that impedes the mobility of older people, who are perceived as an economic burden (Askola, 2016). Embedded in a rhetoric of financial risk, access to parent migration and visitor visas is curtailed by demanding sponsorship requirements and extremely expensive insurance premiums (Merla et al. 2020b). The combination of decreased personal mobility and increased policing of that mobility eventually results in an inability to travel in a phase in the life course that is also often characterized by increased need for personal, hands-on care. This puts the onus on younger family members to increase all forms of care, but in particular the need to be physically co-present to provide hands-on care for the parents in the home country. This set of responsibilities is not aided by the lack of transnational social and welfare policies, care leave options and transferable contributory long-term-care (LTC) provisions (Brandhorst et al., 2019).

While technology can alleviate some of the challenges of communicating across distance by providing instantaneous and real-time contact, the physical divide remains. Employing a psychological approach, Jyotsna Kalavar et al. in their mixed methods study on Indian migrants in the United States, reveal how organizing transnational care for aging mothers in India is linked to high levels of burden and stress for daughters performing the role of ‘in-absentia carers’. Daily stressors in the context of transnational care include feeling helpless and time pressured. Concerns about a ‘double burden’ of caring for their family of procreation in the United States and for their aging parents in the home country across distance, addressing medical emergencies, and a feeling of helplessness were commonly expressed by the migrants. Kalavar and her coauthors conclude that understanding the complexity and the difficulty or obstacles to transnational care may inform social policies, and the importance of understanding transnational caregiver stress in the medical and labor sectors. They advocate for the development of transnational social and welfare policies that address the needs of a substantial proportion of today’s population, who have to organize care across borders.

A similar set of issues to those highlighted in Kalavar et al.’s paper are evident in the experiences of retirement migrants. While Kalavar et al. explore the stressors of in absentia carer daughters, Elifcan Karacan’s article focusses on elderly German retirement migrants in Alanya in the Turkish Riviera, their increased situation of vulnerability and their relationship with children and restricted intergenerational care. She discusses how the lack of geographical proximity to family members increases the vulnerability risks for these older migrants. While moving to a low-cost destination abroad is a strategy to cope with scarce financial resources and low pensions and brings lifestyle benefits, it involves new challenges such as the distance from family and an increasing insecurity about legal status, access to public health and aged care services. Intergenerational care between older parents and children is organized from afar via the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), but is mainly restricted to emotional support, and being involved in family occasions via distance.

Karacan shows that intergenerational hands-on family care of the older retirement migrants, which requires access to mobility rights, is restricted by residence laws, public health and care policies and long-term care insurance regulations. Given the difficulties associated with organizing intergenerational transnational family support, these older migrants have no option but to rely on local community relations. Government and non-government organizations offer consultancy for retirement migrants, in addition, the older German retirement migrants receive support from other members of the German community in the city. Although the support provided within the community in Alanya has similarities with the care provided by the family, care obligations tend to be weaker and long-term care, in particular, cannot be provided by the former. Karacan’s paper therefore shows how aging is a stage in the transnational family life cycle with particular mobility and intergenerational care needs. In the context of decreasing capacities, and deteriorating health and the resultant need for long-term-care, neither transnational family care from a distance nor community support are sufficient for these retirement migrants. This leads retirement migrants to reconsider a return to Germany.

Immobility regimes tend to primarily impact migrants, but they can also impact the stay-behinds in the country of origin, who might not obtain a visiting visa, experience the absence of their migrated relatives and who care for their relatives abroad across distance. Earvin Charles Cabalquinto’s contribution examines the intergenerational transnational care practices provided by those who ‘stayed behind’. Whereas there has been abundant literature on remote mothering by migrant mothers, little research has been done on the use of ICTs and technology by left-behind mothers to organize care work for their children overseas. The article focuses on the meaning of ICTs and new media in challenging or mitigating the restrictions of a mobility regime. Cabalquinto shows how technologies, particularly mobile devices and networked communication platforms, structure and re-shape the temporalities of family care among household members at a distance. Here, media technologies structure family life – allowing families to stay connected while also locating women in a continued performance of affective and unpaid labor, which Cabalquinto calls ‘standby mothering’.

Drawing on Keightley and Reading (2014), Cabalquinto (2020) discusses how technologically mediated mobilities such as mobile device use are informed by social, economic, political, and technological forces. Applying the concept of ‘standby mothering’, Cabalquinto discusses the different forces that shape the affective and technology dependent care practices of left-behind mothers, analyzing the intertwining processes of temporalities of migration, socio-technological affordances and personal strategies that enable the provision of mobile caregiving. Underscoring the politics of mediated mobilities in a digital society (Fraser, 2016), Cabalquinto highlights how care practices mobilized through ICTs, communication devices and platforms on the one hand preserve stringent gendered ideologies and on the other hand amplify the operations of a globalized economy as evidenced in family based, networked and commodified transnational care practices. These gendered care practices and obligations put the lives of the older stayed-behind mothers ‘on hold’, as they are in a ‘standby-mode’ adapting their lives to the temporal availability of the adult migrant children abroad. Women hence, ‘are held’ to their gendered care practices in transnational family life in the immobility regime.

Intergenerational care in the immobility regime

Family expectations, relations, and solidarities play a central role in migration trajectories from the decision to migrate, through the processes of settlement in the host country, to the continuing connections and the social, economic and cultural remittances to sending areas (Brandhorst, 2015; Levitt, 1998, 2001). While much has been written about certain transnational family relations, in particular transnational parenting (Carling et al., 2012), mothering (Dobashi, 2005; Lutz & Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2012; Parreñas, 2001, 2002; Peng & Wong, 2013), and aged care (Baldassar et al., 2007; Brandhorst, 2020), less has been said about how transnational intergenerational care obligations between grandchildren, children and parents are negotiated from afar (Baldassar et al., 2014; Mazzucato, 2013; Zhou, 2012).

Transnational migration of one family member can reconfigure the provision of care within a family system, including gender roles and hierarchies as well as traditional family obligations (Baldassar & Brandhorst, 2020; Brandhorst, 2014, 2015) and can lead to tensions within the family household and between generations. The migrant is often confronted with contrasting gender roles and care obligations in the receiving and the sending society. Furthermore, in cases where female migrants become the main family provider or breadwinner (Fresnoza-Flot, 2009), gender roles and the division of household tasks within the family change. Child- and aged care is either delegated to other female family members, often grandmothers (Mazzucato et al., 2015; Parreñas, 2002; Peng & Wong, 2015) or husbands, who stayed behind with the children in the country of origin (Hoang & Yeoh, 2011). In addition, care is exchanged within the family across generations across the family life course. This highlights the temporal dimension inherent in intergenerational care circulation. Care can be provided at a certain moment and – following the principle of generalized reciprocity (Lévi-Strauss, 1969; Sahlins, 1965) – be returned at a later stage. Furthermore, givers and receivers of care might change over time; parents, who previously were the primary carers will need increasing support from their adult children in old age. This temporality linked to the family life cycle gains a new dimension in the context of transnational family care. On one hand transnational family communication can be immediate and simultaneous through new media and ICTs, on the other hand waiting periods for family reunion and tourist visas can delay the family life course and transform intergenerational care obligations. Experiences of delay and waiting become particularly relevant in contexts of immobility.

The articles of this Special Issue highlight the additional effort required in crafting transnational intergenerational care in the context of immobility regimes and in response to limits on temporality. They uncover the intimate and micro patterns of intergenerational communication – such as sieving, silencing, managing and crafting care. Cabalquinto examines how the relationship between the left-behind mothers in the Philippines and their adult children in Australia is reconfigured by distance and mediated through technologies and how the ‘stayed behind mothers’ are in a ‘standby position’ adapting their care to the temporal availability of their adult migrant children. A similar ‘standby position’ is evident in the experiences of the adult children discussed by Kalavar et al. and Sampaio whose care practices for their aging parents are characterized by careful management of emotions, including by limiting and curating what information is shared. Sakti focuses on the experiences of aging and life in exile, and how the desire of older family members to be physically co-present with their family members is impeded by both real and imagined borders, as well as by the incapacitation of aging bodies.

All of the papers explore how changes in family life stage and the aging of individual family members impact care practices and intergenerational relationships, in particular noting how the experience of aging intersects with experiences of migration. For example, Karacan focuses on the increasing vulnerability of older migrants, in her research on retirement migrants in Turkey. Her contribution highlights the lack of social support networks and structures in the country of settlement, which becomes increasingly salient for those whose independence is diminished with aging, and particularly those who become reliant on long-term care. The dependence of aging parents on their children and grandchildren is also emphasized by Sakti, who shows how the children’s relationship with their country of origin contributes to and shapes the relationship of their older parents to their exile from the latter. Sampaio and Kalavar et al. analyze the challenges of intergenerational aged care and how the inability to be physically co-present as parents age and need more hands-on care results in increased stress and can precipitate distancing mechanisms designed to protect both migrants and their parents from emotional strain. Cabalquinto, in turn, examines how older left-behind mothers stay connected and attached to their migrant children overseas via mobile devices, shedding light on the role of older people in the home country as active carers for the migrated relatives and simultaneously on the increasing emotional dependence of older people on their kin living abroad.

Together, the papers of this Special Issue highlight 4 central themes relevant to the analysis of intergenerational transnational family care in immobility regimes: (a) the impact of inequality and differential access to mobility, (b) the key role of temporality in understanding intergenerational care, (c) the role of absence and silences as coping strategies in response to limits on mobility, and (d) the role of technology as a mitigating or enhancing factor in immobility regimes.

(a) The mobility gap: Inequality or differential access to mobility

By analyzing the “on-going dynamic between situations of settlement and those of mobility within situations of unequal power”, the regimes-of-mobility approach neither normalizes sedentarism nor naturalizes mobility (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013: 188f.) and is a useful concept to analyze the differential access to mobility. The ‘(im)mobility regime’ approach on global power relations that govern access to mobility sensitizes the analysis on transnational family care and transnational intergenerational relationships for global inequalities (based on various heterogeneities: such as gender, ethnicity, age, socioeconomic background, legal status, degree of transnationality, country of origin). Brandhorst (2020) for instance, discusses in her study on older migrants’ support networks the inequalities in the possibilities of giving and receiving transnational care between migrants from different countries of origin. Her interviewees have different opportunities of movement, linked to their legal status and socioeconomic position in the country of settlement. This differential access to mobility – called by Shamir the mobility gap – not only refers to travel and family visits, but also to access to ICTs, to social welfare, as well as access to other parts of the city. “The mobility gap, in and of itself is an expression of the conditions of the possibilities of movement, such as socioeconomic factors, geographical locations, cultural imperatives, and political circumstances,” (Shamir, 2005, p. 200). The differential access to mobility can be enforced by policy tools, such as those defined by Merla et al (2020a) as ‘exclusion tools’; “Categorical exclusions restrict the ‘categorical gateways’ (Clasen & Glegg, 2007, p. 172) governing the conditions of mobility and the concomitant set of entry, residence, economic and social rights” (Merla et al., 2020a, p. 10).

The existing ‘mobility gap’ (Shamir, 2005) becomes clear when we compare family caregiving between transnational families within the European Union Schengen with the attempt to organize transnational care of refugees. Sampaio (in this issue) discusses the impact of legal status of undocumented Brazilian migrants in the United States, that leads to precarity and insecurities and to a practice of silence or hiding their difficult situation in order not to upset their older parents in Brazil.

The papers reveal that the immobility regime does not only refer/apply to hard borders, but also to physical immobility for instance, in the scope of aging, and to imaginary boundaries. Sakti discusses in this issue how the forms of immobility can transcend physical and include the social and emotional boundaries, communities in conflict build against one another over time. Another aspect of the immobility regime is the reduced physical immobility that often accompanies bodily aging.

(b) ‘Care on hold’: Temporality in an Immobility Regime

As the title of this Special Issue indicates, as a result of the immobility regimes, transnational family and intergenerational care practices can be ‘put on hold’ or delayed for specific periods of time. Merla et al. (2020a) point out that this requires careful attention to the temporal aspect in the research of transnational care giving. They argue that governments apply ‘temporal tools’ to prevent transnational family care in the context of ‘immobilizing regimes of migration’. Extending this perspective to focus on the temporal disruptions of intergenerational relations across family life stages – especially how they are impacted by national migration and family reunification policies – is a useful approach in the study of transnational family care within the immobility regime. Merla et al. (2020a) refer to the concept of ‘chronopolitics’ (Gabrian, 1983) to capture the policy array deployed by governments to immobilize migrants and their family members. This includes the rapid migration legislation and visa category changes that hamper migrants’ decisions and certainty about their rights (‘speeding up’ Merla et al. (2020a)). This is for instance, evident in the differentiation and constant change of visa categories and permanent resident and citizenship regulations in Australia (Askola, 2016). Such rapid changes create insecurity and can hamper, modify or impede transnational intergenerational care strategies; “In this case ‘speeding up’ of rule changes exacerbates the pre-existing risks formed at the nexus within migration policies between institutional time and biographical time … ” (Merla et al 2020a, p. 9).

The measures governments use to immobilize migrants also involve a ‘slow down’, a halt or a ‘put on hold’ of life transitions and intergenerational care. This refers to a “suspension or delay in migrants’ desired or intended trajectories” (Robertson, 2016, p. 179), which is particularly relevant for families living in refugee camps or in transit countries. Especially as refugee journeys can take years (Mallett & Hagen-Zanker, 2018), and in the scope of uncertainty in the asylum process transnational family care and social protection are difficult to organize (Amelina & Bause, 2020; Näre, 2020). Scholarship on precarious non-citizenship and irregular migrants or refugees in many parts of the world documents the temporal uncertainties and socio-spatial liminality of people displaced by conflict, disaster or poverty, but also for those who move in search of better lives (Mallett & Hagen-Zanker, 2018; Robertson et al., 2016). Restrictive migration policies make permanent residency and family reunification, and even the ability to make visits, particularly difficult through long waits, high application fees, bureaucratic hurdles and low success rates (Glick, 2010). In this way, temporary labor migrants, refugees and undocumented migrants and their family lives are impacted by ‘permanent temporariness’ (Carciotto, 2018). This temporariness is discussed by Sampaio, whose participants as undocumented migrants have to wait for sometimes decades to get their documents. Sampaio describes the strain migrants experience when they realize that a situation that originally seemed transient – lack of documents, decent work conditions and housing, impossibility to travel and make home visits – might be lasting. The impossibility to visit aging parents is a particular strain, as the undocumented migrants do not know how much time they have left to see their aging parents before their health condition decreases and they die. Sampaio discusses how the undocumented migrants respond to the permanent temporariness, insecurities and precarities with the practice of sieving/silencing.

The maintenance of physical co-presence or of mediated forms of co-presence is particularly difficult for intergenerational relations when people lose agency over temporality. The papers in this Special Issue highlight how this impacts on the way people manage their transnational communication via ICTs. For example, Cabalquinto’s article in this Special Issue discusses how asymmetrical temporalities characterize the transnational intergenerational relationship between aging mothers in the Philippines and their adult children in Australia. He discusses how temporal conditions impact the quality and dynamics of transnational caregiving. The left behind mothers must consider the availability of their adult children abroad to engage in synchronous communication via ICTs. The temporal conditions and availability of the adult children abroad, shaped by work commitments, play a “crucial role in defining and controlling the transfer of transnational caregiving among left-behind mothers” (Cabalquinto p. X). Based on these empirical findings Cabalquinto coins the concept of ‘standby mothering’ to articulate the asymmetrical temporalities, and the conflation of uneven structural and technological dimensions that structure the transnational aging mother and adult child relationship.

(c) Absence of Care and Silence as Coping Strategies

The articles in this Special Issue explore which coping strategies and practices of transnational care migrants, refugees and irregular migrants develop in response to the immobility regime. The experience of exile and the persisting ruptures with the country of origin, or with the family of origin, can be a barrier for transnational family care and also impact the willingness to engage in transnational family care. Furthermore, the impossibility of providing transnational care or the desire to protect families or portray the migration in a more positive light can lead to silencing and sieving of information, in order to protect the relatives or not to upset them. As already noted, this highlights the need to consider the importance of silencing in transnational intergenerational care. Silence is, as Sampaio in this volume discusses, not a withdrawal of care, but rather a form of care practice, sieving information that could worry or upset the aging parents left behind. Silencing and sieving the information that is transmitted is particularly interesting because what is said is not fully materialized and does not have to be dealt with. Simultaneously certain information might be, although not articulated, present and known by migrants and the relatives in the country of origin. This suggests paying attention to silence in the analysis of care and to what is not being said in transnational communications.

Furthermore, in the scope of the analysis of transnational family care giving little attention has been paid to the Absence of Care. Questions such as: in which circumstances do migrants or members of transnational families withhold care or cease to provide care, do not engage in transnational care giving, avoid being connected via ICTs to their families or use the practice of silence, should be further explored. Riak Akuei (2005) shows how African refugees in the United States, for instance, disconnect their phones to avoid pressure from relatives to remit high sums, and thus hide their impossibility to remit in the scope of their low paid precarious employment and living conditions. Brandhorst (2017) observes in her study on Cuban migrants in Germany, how the migrants legitimize their absence of care for their aging parents and family members ‘back home’ by blaming the lack of internet access and high telephone costs. In her article on East Timorese families living in exile in rural Indonesia and their relatives in East Timor, Victoria Sakti (this volume) explores how intergenerational care is constrained by border regimes and in particular by imaginary boundaries in conflict divided communities. In doing so, she sheds light on withholding care and on the asymmetries entailed in intergenerational relationships. Like Sakti, Sampaio (this volume) stresses the need for the study of transnational care to include the analysis of the difficulty or the absence of the provision of hands-on care. Notwithstanding, while acts of care are challenged by physical borders and (im)moblities, they never cease completely. Analyzing transnational care practices also entails ‘silence’ ‘or the absence of the provision of care’, which are particularly relevant in the analysis of intergenerational transnational care in the immobility regime. In showing the relevance of silencing and sieving as transnational care practices, the articles of this Special Issue widen the focus of existing work on transnational care, which tends to focus on material and spoken dimensions of care.

(d) Technology as a Mitigating or Enhancing Factor of Immobility Regimes

The contributions of this Special Issue show that information- and communication technologies (ICTs) can provide a form of connectedness across distance, and how technology-enabled co-presence can mitigate the constraints of an immobility regime/of distance, closed borders and restrictive migration policies (Gifford & Wilding, 2013; Leung, 2011; Robertson et al., 2016). Cabalquinto (this volume) discusses the role of ICTs and new media in mitigating or reinforcing the restrictions of a mobility regime. His study examines how left-behind mothers use ICTs and new media to care for their overseas adult children. Cabalquinto shows how these mothers and their children exchange care in a polymedia environment (Madianou & Miller, 2012), using different types of technologies for different purposes.

Despite these possibilities of synchronous connection and the feeling of co-presence from afar, the contributions in this Special Issue also show that the use of ICTs and new technologies in transnational family communications is embedded in social, economic, political and technological forces and existing socioeconomic and global inequalities. Furthermore, the use of new technologies can reconfigure and re-shape the intergenerational relationship and the form of family care. Referring to the concept of mediated mobilities (Keightley & Reading, 2014), Cabalquinto shows how new media and ICTs, particularly mobile devices and networked communication platforms, structure and re-shape the temporalities of family care among household members at a distance. Furthermore, the use of the plethora of ICTs is also a site of negotiation between emotional closeness and distance, between sharing everything of each other’s lives and withholding information (Baldassar, 2007). The lack of access to ICTs can sometimes be used to legitimize a certain distancing from the family of origin and the withdrawal of care (Brandhorst, 2017). Sampaio in this issue for instance, shows, how different ICTs are used as means of withdrawal or refusal to engage in certain topics. A migrant for instance, avoids talking to his father on the phone and prefers using the family WhatsApp group to check on him ‘from a distance’.

The articles of this Special Issue also show how technologically mediated mobilities such as mobile device use are informed by social, economic, political and technological forces and existing socioeconomic and global inequalities (Brandhorst, 2017; Kania-Lundholm & Torres, 2018, p. 1175). Hence, access to resources such as socioeconomic and cultural capital can define the level and quality of participation in a digitalized society (ibid.). Refugees suffer from the prolongation of asylum processes, social isolation and lack of communication technologies to stay in touch with relatives in the home country (Witteborn, 2015). Cabalquinto’s contribution in this issue discusses one interviewee’s lack of access to a broadband connection as she lived in rural Philippines, that slowed down/impaired the transnational family communication with her child abroad. In addition, the author discusses the differential capacities in ICTs use of the aging mothers.

Furthermore, physical co-presence is sometimes necessary and cannot be bridged by virtual co-presence through ICTs and new media. Particularly in times of crisis, such as illness and death, physical co-presence is required to deliver hands-on care and intimate support. These crisis situations “makes visible all of the impediments to transnational family caregiving that often remain hidden during those periods when ‘routine’ forms of distant care are adequate” (Baldassar, 2008, p. 391). Karacan shows in her article that the intergenerational care between retirement migrants in Turkey and their adult children in Germany is organized from afar via ICTs but is restricted to emotional support and being involved in family events, but is perceived as not sufficient. This cost of distance and stress linked to transnational care despite the connectivity with ICTs is also evident in Kalavar et al.’s (in this volume) research on Indian migrants in the United States caring for their aging mothers in India. Cabalquinto’s study also highlights that despite the use of mobile devices and the polymedia environment through which aging mother’s in the Philippines and their adult children abroad are connected, in situations of crisis, such as illness, the left behind mothers wished to be able to ‘physically care’ for their ill children.

Conclusion

This Special Issue explores how intergenerational care is impacted by the immobility regime. The contributions examine the strategies members of different generations in a transnational family employ in order to cope with the distance and with the consequences of immobility. In particular, they highlight the intimate and micro patterns of care and communication in transnational families that arise in response to immobilities. In showing the relevance of silencing and sieving and the withholding or delaying as transnational care practices, the papers widen the focus of existing work on transnational care, which tends to stress the material and spoken dimensions of care. In addition, they explore how forms of immobility that limit transnational care giving can transcend physical boundaries, and include social and emotional boundaries. They thus open up a discussion on how migration and immobility regimes impact and reconfigure intergenerational relationships within a family system. They show the reconfiguration and changing obligations inherent to intergenerational relationships between children, parents and grandparents across the family life cycle, in particular the impact of aging and aged care obligations, and the gendered nature and cultural dimensions of care in the scope of migration.

The empirical analysis of transnational intergenerational care in the immobility regime reveals interesting perspectives for intergenerational family care in the Covid-19 situation and its social repercussions. The current mobility blocks and lockdowns in many countries of the world, as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, render everyone ‘stuck in place’ and put everyone’s lives ‘on hold’. The travel restrictions and the physical distancing measures adopted in the Covid-19 outbreak by many countries in the world, have physically separated families that were previously not affected by migration, mobility and travel restrictions. In the context of these imposed immobility and physical distancing measures extended families and friends cannot meet in person and have to rely on ICTs and new media to stay connected. Hence, they adopt practices of distant care and staying socially and emotionally connected while physically distant – that transnational families have been using on a regular basis (Baldassar & Krzyżowski, 2020). In the current physical distancing measures migrants and non-migrants alike have to partly organize intergenerational care from a distance and non-migrants and non-transnational carers might face the consequences of the immobility regime, such as a double burden, further strain, a feeling of guilt for not being there and being held in traditional gender roles of reproductive work and adopt similar strategies to manage care obligations and stay socially and emotionally connected across distance.

The papers reveal the different effects of immobility and physical distance on intergenerational family care, which might be instructive for the impact of the lockdowns and closing of national borders in the current Covid-19 situation. Such repercussions are for instance, a reconfiguration of family roles and obligations within families. Simultaneously, we can observe that gendered care practices and obligations can be further reinforced in the context of the immobility regime (see Cabalquinto and Kalavar et al.). This is also apparent in the Covid-19-situation, where “whilst social relations of reproduction, care, migration and labour are profoundly transformed, the contemporary moment is simultaneously shaped by continuities in the crisis of social reproduction,” (Schling et al., 2020, p. 1). Furthermore, the contributions to this Special Issue show the different coping strategies people develop to deal with immobility and physical distance, that might be developed in a similar way in long-lasting physical distancing measures, such as the withholding or withdrawing of care (as discussed by Sakti), silencing and sieving (Sampaio) or different avoiding strategies, such as disconnecting their mobile phones as an avoidance strategy when family obligations cannot be met or care cannot be reciprocated (Riak Akuei, 2005). Stress associated with not being able to care for elderly parents (as discussed by Kalavar et al.) has also been a feature of the lockdowns in the context of the current Covid-19 crisis, in which children are either not allowed to visit their aging parents in aged care homes or in their homes, or where migrant children due to travel restrictions could not visit their aging parents in their country of origin.

To conclude, this Special Issue explores how intergenerational care is impacted by immobility and physical distance, including how life transitions become delayed and how family members are left waiting as a result of restrictions on mobility. At the same time, the papers show that transnational family care is rarely ‘put on hold’ completely, but instead continues to be provided despite closed borders – though perhaps not in the expected or idealized forms. The contributions reveal how members of transnational families manage to provide care despite structural restrictions and how intergenerational care obligations are transformed, reconfigured, rendered obsolete and embedded in asymmetrical temporalities in the context shaped by immobility regimes. Time is revealed to be a crucial factor in intergenerational care circulation in general and an additional drain for transnational carers in the immobility regime.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was jointly supported by the German Research Foundation Grant BR 5645/1-1 (awarded to R. Brandhorst) and the Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP160102552, 2016–2018 (L. Baldassar and R. Wilding).