Moving South: The Economic Motives and Structural Context of North America’s Emigrants in Cuenca, Ecuador

ABSTRACT

The article is based on qualitative interviews with lifestyle migrants from North America to Cuenca, Ecuador. It attempts to further the understanding of transnational migration scholars of the structural contexts that influence lifestyle migration decisions and agency. In 2009, Cuenca was selected by international lifestyle marketer International Living as the best retirement destination in the world, largely based on a methodology that privileges low real estate and living costs. Since then, perhaps as many as 5000 North Americans have moved to the city. North Americans in Cuenca report economic motivation as a major reason for their move, and report making those decisions against a backdrop of economic and financial insecurity. The article argues that they are economic migrants, even as their relatively higher spending power has economic consequences for receiving communities like Cuenca.

Key Words:

• Lifestyle migration
• International retirement migration
• Amenity migration
• Economic migration
• Retirement security
• Ecuador

Notes

1. Lamont (1992) conducted ethnographic work that demonstrated how successful New York professionals tended to justify their lifestyles through appeals to the value of money, whereas their Parisian counterparts more often referred to non-material values, most often achieved through the accumulation of prestigious forms of cultural capital.

2. ‘Retiring Boomers Find 401(k) Plans Fall Short,’ The Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703959604576152792748707356.html. Accessed April 7th, 2013.

3. Two recent news stories on German pensioners are a case in point. See ‘Germany “exporting” old and sick to foreign care homes’, The Guardian, 26 December 2012, and ‘Germany’s far-flung pensioners living in care around the world’, The Guardian, 28 December 2012.