Older migrants: postponing retirement for a fresh start in Spain

After raising five children, celebrating the arrival of 16 grandchildren, overcoming a stormy marriage and completing 47 years of hard work and not always paid, Marcia Asipuela bought a one-way ticket to Spain. At 59, this Ecuadorian woman has taken the same path that her two brothers took 30 years ago. She has done it much older, more tired and more worried, but she does not feel that she is late, but at the right time. "Women over 50 in Ecuador have little job future," she says in a coffee shop in Madrid. "I already know what it's like to be far from home." Beside her, her current partner Mario Chicaiza, 55, nods. They share a simple dream: "We don't want to live here forever, I want to get a little job for three or four years and save that money so we can have a little house for our old age". A house in Ecuador, he adds, where, at least, there is no water and cold. "There they earn 450 dollars a month and it's not enough for anything," they say.

The couple calculated that in two or three months they would be able to get a job, but they have spent half a year running headlong into a labor market that is complicated for everyone, and especially difficult for older immigrants without papers. "If they don't come with a work contract, these people are going to have serious difficulties finding one," explains Rafael Durán, professor of Political Science at the University of Málaga. "If residents have difficulty finding work after 45, even more so a newcomer and over 55. They are people called to experience significant vulnerabilities," he adds.

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More and more foreigners are starting from scratch in Spain. They press the button to reset their lives at a time when they should be thinking about how and when to retire. Between 2008 and 2022, the percentage of over-55s, among foreigners arriving in Spain, has risen from 5.3% to 12%: more than double. That is, some 26,000 seniors last year. The figure excludes EU citizens, a very different type of emigration that generally seeks a placid and sunny retirement on Spanish shores. These new seniors, arriving mainly from Latin America - a growing flow in recent years - are looking to reunite with children or siblings 20 years later or to restart lives ravaged by violence or crises at home. They are increasingly seen in church queues asking for help, in police stations seeking asylum or trying to restart, with difficulty, their careers in Spanish companies, hospitals and organizations.

Older immigrants, almost always invisible in the collective imagination, nevertheless have an impact on the places where they settle. This is evident in some cases, such as the English diaspora in coastal towns, but there is also growing interest in the arrival of other profiles with other motivations and from more distant countries.

Encouraged by the lack of studies that address this issue in its complexity, Professor Rafael Durán and other colleagues from the University of Malaga created the European Observatory of Gerontoimmigrations. The team analyzes "gerontoimmigration", the migration of elderly people to Spain, a phenomenon that is marked by the flows of European retirees, who are the largest group, but also by elderly people regrouped by their already resident relatives, those aged here as labor immigrants or those who acquire Spanish nationality at adulthood because they are descendants of Spanish emigrants. "We realized that they are a group with a lot of impact in certain municipalities and autonomous communities; moreover, there was no academic and multidisciplinary knowledge, so we decided to go into it researchers from legal and social sciences," he explains.

Durán points out that the pandemic served to make "pockets of discrimination" visible. The municipalities devoted more effort to understanding the needs of their citizens and ended up revealing realities that had gone unnoticed. "We have tended to think that those who came with an advanced age did so because they could afford it economically, but at the same time there are pockets of marginalization and exclusion that lead them to be seriously unprotected from a social and health point of view, without the authorities being aware of their existence," explains the professor.

Lucrecia Pacherres, who left her home in Lima five months ago, is in one of those churches in Madrid where undocumented immigrants queue up in the hope that nuns and priests will find them a job. She traveled to Spain with her 35-year-old daughter with the idea of working, "having something for old age" and returning to Peru to set up a weaving and embroidery workshop. In her country she alternated her job as a seamstress with that of a house cleaner, but in Spain she has not yet been able to get started. When she arrived she settled in Santander, where her daughter got a cleaning job, but she, who turns 60 in November, spent four months looking unsuccessfully, until she decided to move to Madrid alone at the beginning of April. In this time, apart from a sporadic job making bracelets and key chains for an acquaintance, she has not managed to find anything else.

Pacherres has thought about returning to Lima. She confesses that the anxiety caused by unemployment sometimes overwhelms her, although she finds strength in her daughter's words: "She encourages me, she tells me that if we both came here it was to fight, not for me to go and leave her, that if I gave things to her, now it's her turn to give them to me. But it is not like that, because she is also fighting to bring her husband and her son, and I am not going to be another burden," she says.

Rafael Durán maintains that about 70% of immigrants who retire or grow old in Spain end up staying in the country, both because of the new personal ties they create and the economic sacrifices they would make if they decide to return. However, both Chicaiza and Asipuela and also Pacherres want to return to their countries of origin. They are revolted by the idea of staying in Europe forever. In their case, at around 60, the clock is particularly against them: their health is a concern to keep up the pace of a demanding job and the longer they take to restart in Spain, the harder it will be for them to start again back home. After six months of non-stop searching, Marcia Asipuela and Mario Chicaiza's meter has just started ticking. She has started working as an intern in Madrid; and he, who has a disability in one arm and his right leg, found a job as a construction worker in Soria. Although separated, they are already a little closer to getting that house without leaks.

This report has been published as part of the "re:framing Migrants in European Media" project, supported by the European Commission. The project is coordinated by the European Cultural Foundation.

CREDIT: CE Noticias Financieras English - CENFENG