Old age facilities for German-speaking people in Thailand – a new facet of international migration in old age

ABSTRACT

This article examines old age facilities in Thailand catering to people from German-speaking countries. These institutionalised spaces of age(ing) in the ‘Global South’ represent a new facet of migration in old age. Starting with the question of what motivates people to migrate in old age and to opt for these facilities in Thailand, the article identifies important factors that characterise what these facilities offer and shows the compatibility that exists between these offerings and the heterogeneous needs and aspirations of the older migrants. Transnational intertwinements between Thailand and the Germanophone countries of origin characterise many of the specific features of these facilities, which allow them to present multiple perspectives for extended life options for ageing people from German-speaking countries. They provide institutionalised responses to a range of different hopes and unmet needs associated with the prospect of growing (and being) older while remaining in the country of origin, and at the same time, they address the challenges and potential risks of the migration process.

KEYWORDS:

• Retirement migration
• old age mobility
• transnational ageing
• institutionalisation of mobile ageing
• reasons for migration
• Thailand

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Deborah Shannon and Manuela Popovici for their careful translation and proofreading of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Care migration’ is a relatively new type of migration, focused on the migration of older people for the purpose of care and assisted living abroad. It is associated with the emergence of specific retirement and care facilities in various countries, particularly in Asia and Eastern Europe (Bender, Hollstein, and Schweppe 2017a; Horn et al. 2016).

2. Overall, a significant proportion of the residents consists of single persons and among them single women, even though Thailand generally tends to attract more male migration in old age (Howard 2009).

3. All interviewees’ names are anonymised.

4. This constellation in which the facility is the starting point for the migration project and is pivotal to the decision to migrate is characteristic of care migration to Thailand, which takes place for the purpose of receiving care in the facilities. Frequently, however, it is not the residents but their relatives who make this decision, and the choice of the facility in Thailand is preceded by a phase of exploring, or even trying out other care arrangements in the country of origin. Thus, they may be actively searching for suitable institutional care contexts when they discover the facility, and this leads them to place their relatives in residential care in Thailand.

5. Some residents explain that their pensions alone would not be sufficient to finance care in Germany or Switzerland. Apart from the dependence on state benefits and the often associated assumption that this would be detrimental to the quality of care received, a frequent aim is to avoid having to finance care needs by investing personal assets (like one's own house) or potentially exposing children to maintenance-payment obligations.