Colonial Ageing: A Study of Older Europeans' Search for a Better Life and Care in Thailand

In existing literature, the global division of social reproductive labour is largely analysed with a focus on care workers who migrate from the global South towards the global North. I break away from this approach by looking at a contrasting, and rarely examined, pattern of mobility where care recipients from German-speaking countries migrate to Thailand. The project explores how many older Europeans increasingly feel that it is difficult for them to afford a ‘good life’ and adequate care, compelling them to seek socio-economic mobility through spatial mobility towards the global South. In Thailand, older Europeans (re)gain access to a desired lifestyle and quality of care, dependent on racialised and gendered hierarchies, global inequality, and a global mobility regime geared towards Europeans’ seamless southbound migration. Based on ethnographic insights from retirement facilities catering to Europeans in Thailand and bringing together the literatures on the neocolonial extraction of social reproductive labour, neoliberalisation, and retirement migration, I argue that the care-related mobility of older Europeans towards the global South constitutes an emerging mode of neocolonial care labour extraction. In this labour extraction pattern, racialised care workers are no longer ‘hosted’ in Europe, where their presence unsettles ethnonationalist fantasies of a white Europe and where regulations affording them even remotely acceptable working conditions and wages disrupt capital’s thirst for less restrained exploitation.