Date of Award

12-1-2023

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Sociology

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Angie Y Chung

Committee Members

Joanna Dreby, Zai Liang, Stacy Torres

Keywords

Aging and Health, Asian American, Immigration, Qualitative Research, Social Networks

Subject Categories

Sociology

Abstract

Older immigrants make up an increasingly larger share of the overall aging population in the United States. This demographic shift brings challenges to existing systems of elder care provision and calls for an in-depth understanding of aging immigrants’ diverse needs. As immigrants grow older, they need to get support from families, non-kin persons, and formal services to manage various challenges. However, their sense of entitlement to receive care from each source has changed because of the readapted intergenerational reciprocity at home, shifting contexts of interactions and norms of reciprocity with non-kin persons in the community, and the interrupted obligations between immigrants and their host and home governments. How do immigrant elders seek care and claim their deservingness of care from adult children, friends, and formal services? Drawing on in-depth interviews with forty-two Chinese immigrant elders and twenty-three aging and ethnic organization workers, I show that international migration is a critical life transition that triggers immigrants’ unequal accumulation of material, cultural, social, and moral resources throughout their life course, depending on their age at migration, socioeconomic status, gender, and citizenship status. Disparities in these resources further lead to older immigrants’ varied power to mobilize care from their adult children, non-family persons in the community, and professional care from formal services. As a result, as immigrant elders of different backgrounds piece together different packages of resources to care for themselves, strive for autonomy, and resist being labeled as a burden to others, some are better able to claim a sense of deservingness for care while others are socially isolated and marginalized as undeserving. Overall, in a rapidly aging and highly mobile world, immigrants hold an ambivalent social position to receive care in later life. Analyzing their experiences helps us identify the existing institutional and cultural barriers to supporting a growing population on the move.

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