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Families Caring Across Borders: Migration, Ageing and Transnational Caregiving

Sociologists interested in caring have had, in recent years, probing research and theory examining caring as tethered in complex webs to gender, family structures, and social change, particularly welfare state and workrelated change. Ditto for those interested in migration across borders. With respect to aging, there is a widening literature but perhaps one still seeking theoretical depth. What had been missing thus far was pulling together of the pieces of caring, transborder migration and aging. As the authors aptly observe, transnational caring has been invisible to both research and policy. This is surprising since migrating families give up neither caring nor aging. Thus, Baldassar, Baldock and Wilding’s book is a welcome and timely contribution to both the sociology and gerontology literatures. Families Caring Across Borders sets its goal clearly and succinctly: examining how families negotiate and experience aged care relations across borders and distance. Their research subjects are transnational migrants living in Perth, Western Australia, the most isolated capital city (of a state/province) in the world. Respondents are not only caring at a distance, but at vast distances. Specifically, the book summarizes a complex ethnographic research inquiry, begun in 2000, that asks how care is “accomplished” between family members who live far apart and in different countries. Interviews were conducted not only with migrants and refugees in Australia, but also with the migrants’ aged parents/relatives in their homelands or transit countries. Six migrant/refugee groups are included: from Italy, Ireland, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore and Iraq/Afghanistan. The book is organized into eight relatively short chapters: a stage-setting chapter, followed by an outline of the challenges of doing research on transnational caring, the contexts of migration from the various countries, transnational caring between generations, communicating across borders, the role of visits, policy implications, and concluding with some thoughts on a new model of transnational caregiving. The writing is clear and moves the reader from page to page. And the book certainly suffers from no surfeit of figures; it offers just one, the proposed model in the concluding chapter, although there are sixteen tables scattered throughout the book. The methodological approach takes account of both biography and history by analyzing the importance of migrants’ time and circumstances as well as the past and current socio-political situations in the homeland or transit country. The ethnographic interviews, true to anthropological tradition, include observations on the environs of the interview, i.e., how homes are organized, where communications equipment is in the home, displays of photographs, and indications of transnational gift-giving. The three researchers and their assistants benefit from deep connections to the countries of origin of the migrants, including language fluencies. Interviews focused on the qualitative experience of care exchanges, with no attempt to quantify any dimension of the exchanges. What is learned about transnational migrants and caring? Huge generational divides are apparent among migrants even from the same country. A female respondent from Italy, for example, explains that she has nothing in common with earlier Italian migrants to Australia, in that she came not for economic reasons, and not from the south of Italy from which, she said, came “hairy people.” She adds that she maintains a business, home, and car in Italy and returns twice a year. The image is clear of changing migrant circumstances simultaneous with changing socio-political contexts both in the homelands and in Australia. The constant throughout the interviews is the need to negotiate ceaselessly to maintain long distance caring relations. Myths and oversimplified “cultural difference” interpretations fall quickly in this analysis. Obligations to care are indeed tied to expectations and notions of appropriate behaviors, which tend to be culturally tinged. That said, capacities and obligations are shown to be mediated by a complex set of