Retirement migration

Retirement migration is generally conceptualised as a particular type of lifestyle migration that certain individuals engage in after their retirement from regular work. Although there is not a clear-cut definition, Benson and O'Reilly (Reference Benson and O'Reilly2009: 609) describe lifestyle migrants as ‘relatively affluent individuals of all ages, moving either part-time or full-time to places that, for various reasons, signify, for the migrant, a better quality of life.’ These migrants are ‘driven by consumption rather than production’ (Oliver, Reference Oliver and Betts2011:133), and the voluntary component of their decision to relocate is generally stressed (Blaakilde and Nilsson, Reference Blaakilde, Nilsson, Blaakilde and Nilsson2013: 16).

The migration of pensioners to a different area, often characterised by a better climate and a wider range of amenities, has generated a considerable amount of research over the past three decades. Initially, it was the internal migration of US retirees to Sunbelt states that caught the attention of scholars working in the field of migration (for a summary, see Longino and Bradley, Reference Longino, Bradley, Binstock and George2005). Research on the European correlate of this phenomenon (i.e., the relocation of elderly citizens from northern to southern European countries) started slightly later, in the mid 1990s, but has provided ample new perspectives. From the year 2000 onwards, there have been several attempts to understand intra-European retirement migration led by scholars from either the sending or the destination countries of elderly migrants. Academics have researched the socio-demographic characteristics and motives behind the migration of IRMs (Casado-Díaz, Reference Casado-Díaz2006; Durán, Reference Durán2012; Rodriguez et al., Reference Rodríguez, Fernández-Mayoralas and Rojo2004), their housing preferences (Gibler et al., 2009), the strategies developed to keep in contact with friends and family in the home country (Åkerlund, Reference Åkerlund2013), the problems encountered in the process of settlement (Huete and Mantecón, Reference Huete and Mantecón2013), the new routines and daily activities of retired migrants (Haug et al., Reference Haug, Dann and Mehmetoglu2007; Karisto, Reference Karisto, Blaakilde and Nilsson2013), and so on. Two additional (but much less traversed) avenues for research should be mentioned as well: the perceptions and opinions of other actors involved in or affected by retirement migration, and the macro-level impact of this phenomenon on the destination sites.

With respect to the study of other actors, Nudrali and O'Reilly (Reference Nudrali, O'Reilly, Benson and O'Reilly2009) and Bayir and Shah (Reference Bayir and Shah2012) reflect on the reactions of the local population to the presence of British retirement migrants in Turkish villages. Domínguez Mujica and Parreño Castellano (Reference Domínguez Mujica and Parreño Castellano2014) and Gavanas and Calzada (Reference Gavanas, Calzada, Palenga-Möllenbeck and Kilkey2015) detail the variety of workers and entrepreneurs who provide services to IRMs in Spain. To the extent of the author's knowledge, this is the first article to highlight the opinions and experiences of social workers serving in areas with a high concentration of retirement migrants.

With regard to studies on the impact of retirement migration, we find more extensive research in the US than in Europe, possibly due to the fact that US scholars can draw on more reliable data than their European counterparts. The within-country nature of retirement migration in the US facilitates the measurement of migration flows, allowing correlations to be made between the arrival of retirement migrants and other social and economic trends (Cromartie and Nelson, Reference Cromartie and Nelson2009; Sharma, Reference Sharma2015). In Europe, this type of impact assessment has been hindered by the lack of reliable information on the actual number of retirement migrants living in settlement areas. Many retirement migrants never register as residents in their municipalities of settlement (Casado-Díaz and Rodríguez, Reference Casado-Díaz and Rodríguez2002; Rodríguez et al., Reference Rodríguez, Fernández-Mayoralas and Rojo2004), and correlations between socio-economic and IRM trends can provide at best tentative results. These difficulties notwithstanding, attempts have been made to assess the environmental impact of retirement migration (Zasada et al., Reference Zasada, Alves, Müller, Piorr, Berges and Bell2010) and the associated effects on housing markets (Rodriguez et al., Reference Rodríguez, Huber and Casado-Díaz2000). Although several scholars have expressed an interest (and some concern) regarding the impact that intra-European retirement migration may have on public welfare programmes, research on this particular issue has been scarce. Only a handful of studies have addressed the use of public health services by IRMs, and these have reached contradictory conclusions. Casado-Díaz (Reference Casado-Díaz2006) implemented a non-random survey of elderly retirees who own houses in Torrevieja (Spain), finding that a large majority ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ used the Spanish public healthcare services. By contrast, the ethnographic research conducted by Legido-Quigley and McKee (Reference Legido-Quigley and McKee2012) on British pensioners living on the Spanish coast concluded that these individuals extensively use (and are satisfied with) these services.

Legal studies on the social rights of IRMs (Ackers and Dwyer, Reference Ackers and Dwyer2004; Dwyer and Papadimitriou, Reference Dwyer and Papadimitriou2006) point to the complexity and unevenness of social protection for this group, but no previous study (that I am aware of) has tried to assess the actual use that retirement migrants make of the social services in their host country. I believe that this issue is worthy of investigation because it can have such a drastic impact on both IRMs and local services.

From the point of view of retirement migrants, social services may be the only option for those who want to remain in Spain until the end of their lives. The income of many IRMs might be sufficient to pay for private health insurance but it is rarely enough to afford private care services when dependency sets in (Oliver and O'Reilly, Reference Oliver and O'Reilly2010; Blaakilde, Reference Blaakilde, Blaakilde and Nilsson2013). In addition, the growing trend toward relocation in later life as an economic strategy (Hayes, Reference Hayes2014) increases the number of IRMs who, having sold their properties to fund their migration, cannot easily return to their native countries.

From the perspective of the host country's social services, retirement migrants can constitute a sizeable share of claimants in certain areas. Town council registers show that more than 25 per cent of the residents in many municipalities along the Spanish coastline come from a different EU country (mainly Germany, the UK and Scandinavian countries plus Norway); in a non-negligible number of municipalities, this percentage is over 50 per cent (Huete and Mantecón, Reference Huete and Mantecón2011; Durán, Reference Durán2012). Even if only a minority of these elderly residents decide not to return home, their presence and needs may represent a challenge for social and healthcare services. This concern has been expressed for many years now, from the pioneering studies on IRMs in Spain (Jurdao and Sánchez, Reference Jurdao and Sánchez1990) to very recent research efforts (Casado-Díaz, Reference Casado-Díaz2006; Gibler et al., 2009; Durán, Reference Durán2012).

Social services in Spain

Like the other Mediterranean countries, Spain is an uncertain fit in the well-established welfare typologies (Esping-Andersen, Reference Esping-Andersen1990; Korpi and Palme, Reference Korpi and Palme1998). One of the main reasons for this misfit is that welfare systems in Southern Europe, and particularly in Spain, combine programmes similar in design to those in the Nordic countries (universal and high-quality public healthcare services, high replacement rate for pensions and unemployment benefits) with others that resemble those of Liberal welfare states: means-tested and with meagre benefits. This has led various scholars to suggest the need to include a fourth type of welfare state: the ‘Southern’, ‘Mediterranean’, or ‘Familistic’ welfare model (Leibfried, Reference Leibfriedss, Pierson and Castles1992; Ferrera, Reference Ferrera1996; Bonoli, Reference Bonoli1997). This last term is possibly the one that best captures the idiosyncrasies of the model, since the entire system is based on the assumption that although the state is responsible for providing healthcare, education, and pensions, all care needs should be provided for within the family.

Up until 2006, the residual state intervention in care consisted of a means-tested, underfunded, fragmented, and decentralised scheme of personal services run by regional governments and municipalities that catered only to those in the most urgent need. In 2007, the country witnessed a major attempt to reform the public system of care with the coming into force of the ‘Law on the Promotion of Personal Autonomy and Care for Dependent Persons’ (known as the ‘Dependency Law’), which established a national public programme of care called SAAD (System of Autonomy and Dependency Care). This programme, implemented through a combination of direct service provision and cash transfers, features universal coverage; its funding was expected to be shared between the central government (1/3), the regions (1/3), and users’ co-payments (1/3) (Moreno-Fuentes, Reference Moreno-Fuentes and Pino2015).

At present, the old and new programmes of public care coexist. SAAD provides help to residents in Spain with upper-middle and high levels of dependency, but the programme's application was delayed for individuals with low levels of dependency (due to the economic crisis). The old means-tested system is used to provide care services for those with low dependency levels and to assist people in extreme need who do not meet the criteria to access SAAD. Social workers are the gatekeepers of both programmes: they manage the applications to SAAD, organise the evaluations of dependency and, in the case of the old programme of means-tested benefits, perform the evaluation of needs and resources for each claimant and decide on the amount and nature of public help that will be received.

Do retirement migrants use social services at all?

In the majority of the municipalities, social workers told us that retirement migrants constitute a minority of those who receive in-home help or cash transfers. However, in a large area of Isla del Sol that includes most of the villages where retirement migrants settle, applications coming from this group have increased steadily over the past ten years, currently amounting to around 20 per cent of care recipients. This represents a source of concern for social workers. More than 30 per cent of the elderly residents in this area have a foreign nationality; oddly, this percentage is higher in municipalities where social workers told us that applications from IRMs were rare.

Independent of the share of retirement migrants among the applicants, social workers share a common perception of the process by which IRMs enter into contact with the social services. In their view, IRMs arrive in Spain when they are relatively young and in a good mental and physical state, and they generally come in couples. For some years, they enjoy an active social life and engage in a variety of outdoor activities with little contact with Spaniards or Spanish institutions. This in-group life, depicted in previous studies (O'Reilly, Reference O'Reilly2007; Rodríguez et al., Reference Rodríguez, Fernández-Mayoralas and Rojo2004; Huete and Mantecón, Reference Huete and Mantecón2011; Haug et al., Reference Haug, Dann and Mehmetoglu2007), was repeatedly mentioned during our fieldwork, with expressions such as ‘each one lives in their own population cluster’, ‘they live in a parallel society’, and ‘it is a colony’.

Thus, in the beginning, these retirees are happy, active, social and not particularly integrated into Spanish society. But at some point, difficulties emerge. Mobility constraints can complicate daily life: cleaning the house, visiting the doctor, and going grocery shopping require ever more time and effort, especially because many of the areas where retirement migrants live are located kilometres away from the city centre. Social life and outdoor activities may also be restricted by health conditions (Legido-Quigley and McKee, Reference Legido-Quigley and McKee2012). The death of one's partner can result in isolation and a substantial reduction in disposable income. In the face of situations such as these, many IRMs return to their native countries. The extent of return migration is difficult to assess, but this phenomenon has been detected by qualitative studies on frail IRMs (Hall and Hardill, Reference Hall and Hardill2016), quantitative analysis of surveys and town council registers (Giner et al., 2015), and also by studies on the death registers of foreign retirees living in Spain (Giner and Simó, Reference Giner, Simó, Mazón, Huete and Mantecón2009). In light of the fact that most of the 120 service providers interviewed during the course of our fieldwork perceive return migration to be a major trend (even a massive trend), we can safely assume that a substantial number of IRMs do indeed return at some point.

But there are, of course, others who decide to stay in Spain until the very end, a desire that was mentioned in several of our interviews with service providers with a hint of admiration:

Social workers are far less appreciative of this behaviour. Remaining in Spain after dependency sets in is considered a risky decision, understandable only in relation to cultural differences in attachment to homeland and family, or to beliefs about the healing effects of light and weather that some view as misguided. During our fieldwork, we were able to observe how those who were determined to stay in Spain sought to mobilise various resources (economic, cultural, social) in order to obtain care services through the market, voluntary associations, and their personal social networks. It is only when all their strategies fail that the social services step in.

The decision to die in Spain is also interpreted by social workers in negative terms, as a forced choice when one has nowhere else to go. As Benson and O'Reilly (Reference Benson and O'Reilly2009) stress, ‘many lifestyle migrants have had to consolidate all their economic resources to move (lock, stock, and barrel, as it were)’ (2009: 619).

First contact with public social services

There are two types of first contact between IRMs and social services: individuals who approach the social services in person and voluntarily, and generally fail to obtain access to public provision, and those who are unwillingly brought into contact due to their extreme situation, and who are granted some kind of public help.

According to the social workers interviewed, few retirement migrants approach the social services to inquire about the procedures necessary to receive public in-home care. These few correspond to the more ‘integrated’ IRMs: people who can speak some Spanish, are registered as residents in the municipality where they live, and have social or family relationships with Spaniards (they married a Spaniard, or their children married Spaniards and now live in Spain). However, the two overlapping programmes of public care generally disqualify them from receiving the potential benefits. Those with old-age pensions that exceed Spanish standards are excluded from the old means-tested programme of eldercare. And until they reach a severe level of dependency, they are excluded from the new SAAD system of universal coverage, which has only been implemented for medium and severe dependency levels (although the end of 2015 witnessed the initial steps to expand SAAD's coverage also to low levels of dependency).

In most cases, however, the social worker is not contacted directly by the retirement migrant in need of help but by some other actor. In the majority of cases, a doctor alerts the social services after having treated an IRM whom they perceive to be in a state of need or abandonment. Alternatively, the medical staff of a public or private hospital, after performing surgery on an elderly European, may determine that she/he cannot be sent home unattended. Apart from medical professionals, it can also be a friend or a neighbour who asks the social services to intervene. In the most extreme situations, the social worker is contacted by the president of the homeowners’ association where the IRM lives because her/his deterioration is evident: rubbish piled at the door or a bad smell coming from the apartment.

It seems clear that some retirement migrants with serious care needs are unable to develop strategies to obtain care and remain without assistance until a third party intervenes. These interventions are not generally welcomed by the retirement migrant, making them ‘difficult’ cases:

Workers in public and private eldercare services share the impression that IRMs in general, and Scandinavian IRMs in particular, value personal autonomy above all and fiercely resist any interference in their privacy. They are perceived as highly reluctant to receive assistance, even in the face of severe autonomy problems. Having a clean house or eating a hot meal every day are put aside for the sake of independent living; this astonishes the social workers, who consider these to be key elements of a good quality of life. Encarni, a social worker in Isla Bonita, explained that retirement migrants resort to the social services only when all their efforts to live independently have failed, and this reluctance to receive external care services was also mentioned by private caregivers and owners of small care-service companies.

The process of receiving public elderly care

Once the social services are contacted, a social worker must evaluate the care needs and care resources of the claimant, verify that she/he complies with the requirements to access public help, and design a care strategy that meets the person's needs. However, this process is riddled with difficulties when the person in question is an elderly foreigner.

Providing care for retirement migrants

The final step of the process is to assign a caregiver with specific schedules and tasks. Do the staff of the Spanish social services speak a variety of different languages and understand the social norms governing care issues in the native countries of IRMs? Not really. Is this a problem? Again, not really, at least from the point of view of the social workers supervising care and of the caregivers who assist elderly northern Europeans in Spain.

From the perspective of social workers, the major drawback once the caregiver is assigned concerns the meagre services that they can offer. Because the system is based on familistic assumptions, Spanish eldercare services rely on the presence of family members who can take part in the necessary care tasks; consequently, these services are intended to provide extra assistance rather than full-time care. When neither family nor friends can be included in the care strategy, public programmes are clearly insufficient.

The caregivers employed to provide public in-home services are accustomed to working for people with limited cognitive abilities, and so they do not view the absence of verbal communication as particularly worrisome. They have clearly established tasks and schedules, determined by the social worker, that are performed as part of a routine, and speaking is not necessary. They would like more communication to be possible, but they stress the importance of being kind and affectionate. From their point of view, a smile is more important than being able to speak in the language of the client.

In terms of a more general evaluation of the phenomenon, the opinions of social workers seem to depend on the share of retirement migrants among the claimants in their jurisdiction. Retirement migration is viewed as unproblematic for Spanish social services in municipalities in which the need to arrange public help for IRMs arises infrequently. But in the region of Santa Brígida (Isla del Sol), where more than 20 per cent of applications come from retirement migrants, social workers are extremely worried about the impact that this type of migration is having on their work. As one social worker explained, ‘Every year we have more and more. This year it's overflowing. Every week you can have a new case.’

Social workers in the various villages in the Santa Brígida area feel abandoned by the Spanish authorities, and they wonder to what extent anyone not directly involved in the local social services knows about the situation. They are unprepared to provide adequate care for this group of claimants, with no language competences and strained budgets that are insufficient to implement the adaptations required to properly attend to the needs of IRMs. The impossibility of providing adequate help – especially when the retirement migrant opposes their intervention – has worried some of them to the point of asking the professional board of social workers for legal advice.