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

In existing literature, the global division of care labour is largely analysed with a focus on caregivers 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 neoliberalisation makes it increasingly difficult for older people from working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds in Europe to afford a ‘good life’ and adequate care, compelling them to seek social mobility through spatial mobility towards the global South. Moreover, I unpack the ways in which the North-South migration of older Europeans is further informed by non-economic aspects, including racialised imaginaries and sexual/romantic desires. I am also interested in how histories of colonialism and the post-colonial global governance of human mobility facilitate this trajectory of migration, as well as how coloniality operates discursively within care homes for Europeans in Thailand. The phenomenon seemingly signals the emergence of a labour extraction pattern in which racialised caregivers are no longer ‘hosted’ in Europe, where their presence unsettles ethnonationalist fantasies of a white Europe and where regulation granting them even remotely acceptable working conditions and wages disrupts capital’s thirst for unregulated exploitation. In other words, the neoliberalisation of global care economies appears to take shape by returning to labour extraction through settlement in the global South, as in times of classical colonialism. I therefore suggest that examining the migration of older European care recipients to the global South is imperative to developing a more complete understanding of contemporary global care economies. I approach this topic through a critical, decolonial, and interdisciplinary framework of analysis, which centres on political economy but also looks beyond the economic sphere. My analysis draws primarily on ethnographic data (participant observation and in-depth interviews) from retirement homes in Thailand that cater predominantly to German-speaking Europeans.