1.1 Ageing Populations and Global Migration

The study of ageing temporary migrants in Asia is situated in a context where the world is moving towards significantly older populations. The number of older persons aged sixty-five years or older is projected to more than double, going from 761 million in 2021 up to 1.6 billion in 2050 globally. The highest and fastest growth will occur in South and Southeast Asia (accounting for 60 per cent of the global increase), alongside Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (UNDESA 2023). These regions are still often perceived as young, rather than as regions that are rapidly ageing in their own right.

Ageing populations and the increasing life expectancies that they reflect are called on the one hand, ‘a triumph of development’Footnote ⁵ by international organizations. On the other hand, they are framed in many debates as a policy problem or even a crisis, generating social and economic anxieties about a shrinking labour force and increasing strains on health and care services. The dominant focus on ageing as a social problem and the construction of older people as vulnerable, withdrawn, and unproductive, overlooks the fact that the category of ‘older people’ is a highly diverse and heterogeneous category encompassing vastly varied life trajectories and experiences (Hromadžić and Palmberger Reference Hromadžić and Palmberger2018; King et al. Reference King, Lulle, Sampaio and Vullnetari2017). Between the two poles that are typically associated with growing old – from romanticized imaginaries of living the later years of one’s life with dignity, to the isolation and inequalities that can accompany older-age – are ambivalent and complex negotiations of kinship, care, social relationships, home, and belonging. This is especially true for older migrants and diasporas who are ageing in a place that may be different from where they were born.

The realities of ageing in an increasingly interconnected world call for a more sustained focus on the intersections between ageing and migration and on understanding what it means to age and plan for older-age, in transnational and globalized contexts. Debates in demographic, gerontological, and policy spheres are largely premised on an understanding of ageing as a process that takes place in situ and within the bounded framework of nation-states. A prevalent policy focus on ‘ageing-in-place’ as an ideal, for instance, valorizes arrangements where older adults receive care in the places where they live. Such a perspective is not as relevant to mobile people who hold ties and networks across multiple places (Ho et al. Reference Ho, Chua and Feng2024). Examining the ageing-migration nexus thus enables a recognition of ageing as a process intricately tied to transnational living, moving beyond nation-centred narratives on ageing. At the same time, state-based policies, institutions, and borders continue to profoundly shape the experiences of older migrants with transnational lives, including their choices (or lack thereof) on where to age, how, and with whom.

Another relevant area of academic and policy debate is the migration-development nexus, where the focus – implicitly or explicitly – has predominantly been on the development potential of younger or working-age migrants and their future social and economic contributions to the societies in which they live and move (see e.g., KNOMAD/Samuel Hall 2022; Piper Reference Piper2009). There has been far less attention to how older migrants might continue to make socio-economic contributions to their communities (Bastia, Lulle, and King Reference Bastia, Lulle and King2022). A shift in focus towards ageing migrants thus redresses assumptions that older populations are the passive, ‘unproductive’ or ‘burdensome’ presences left behind. Many older migrants remain actively embedded in transnational networks, engaged in new forms of sociality, activism, and politics, and play an integral role in familial care practices not only as care receivers but as those who continue to financially support their families, and provide and exchange care across borders (Amrith, Sakti, and Sampaio Reference Amrith, Sakti and Sampaio2023; Sakti Reference Sakti2022).

A key body of literature that informs this Element is the interdisciplinary work on transnational ageing, which analyses transformations in care, kinship, social protection, and retirement arrangements as people grow older across borders (Baldassar Reference Baldassar2007; Ciobanu and Hunter Reference Ciobanu and Hunter2017; Dossa and Coe Reference Coe, Dossa and Coe2017; Näre, Walsh, and Baldassar Reference Näre, Walsh and Baldassar2017). Scholarship in this field has examined the experiences of ageing labour migrants and how they navigate transnational care arrangements, complex relationships to their homelands, and practical matters of welfare in the later stages of their lives (see e.g., Hunter Reference Hunter2018; Palmberger Reference Palmberger2019). These studies have largely focussed on migrants with settled status in Europe and who have the option to travel back and forth, weighing up the possibilities of ageing ‘here’ and/or ‘there’ (Kahveci et al. Reference Kahveci, Karacan and Kosnick2020). Another key study (Parreñas Reference Parreñas2015) is on ageing Filipino domestic workers in the US and their need to continue labouring well into their own older-age due to elusive retirement and social security protections for documented and undocumented workers.

This Element considers what is at stake for older labour migrants in other world regions, in this case Asia; a context where people work under temporary migration regimes which leave them no choice but to return to their countries of origin in later life, once their work permits expire. The literature on temporary labour migration has examined many important dimensions of migrant lives: remittances, transnational family life, labour exploitation and agency, exclusions of low-waged migrants in urban spaces, and more recently, projects of self-making through religion, love, and care (Constable Reference Constable2007, Reference Constable2014; Johnson and Werbner Reference Johnson and Werbner2010; Liebelt Reference Liebelt2011b; McKay Reference McKay2007; Parreñas 2021). While there has been growing acknowledgement of ‘serial migration’ patterns and living in conditions of long-term temporariness (Yeoh Reference Yeoh2021), age has rarely featured in the study of low-waged temporary migrant workers in Asia and the Gulf, with little known on how long-term migrants prepare for their futures in retirement.Footnote ⁶

In addition to recentring the focus on the social experiences of ageing migrants in and from cultural milieus that have been less visible in research and policy agendas, this Element moves beyond seeing the ‘Global South’ as merely a source of care and intimate labour for older populations in the ‘North’. These are world regions that are, and will be, confronting significant transformations as their populations age rapidly amidst unequal global interconnection and transnational migration (Bastia, Valenzuela, and Pozo Reference Bastia, Valenzuela and Pozo2021; Coe Reference Coe2023; Gamburd Reference Gamburd2020; Lamb Reference Lamb2009; Sampaio and Amrith Reference Sampaio and Amrith2023).

1.2 Temporary Migrants: Temporality and the Life Course

Given that temporary migrants are kept ‘eternally young’ and ‘ageless’ through the restrictive migration policies which govern their stays abroad, questions related to their ageing and their later life social protections have remained at the margins of both academic scholarship and policy discussions. While a few countries have developed transnational contributory social protection schemes (see Section 2), the payments are rarely enough to sustain migrant livelihoods through their retirement. Singapore and Hong Kong do not provide any long-term social protection to temporary migrant workers, whose later-life needs ‘post-migration’ are seen to be the concern of countries of origin and migrants’ kin. This lack of attention to migrants’ later life needs is further accentuated by the historical gendered devaluation of care labour and migrant care labour in particular (Buch Reference Buch2018).

Theories of time and temporality are central to understanding temporary migrants’ ageing experiences and futures. The ‘temporal turn’ in migration studies examines the long-term consequences of migration on people’s lives, relationships, and sense of place and belonging (Sun Reference Sun2021), and how migration journeys take on changing expressions over time and the life course (Coe Reference Coe2016; Cojocaru Reference Cojocaru2020; Mazzucato and Ogden Reference Mazzucato and Ogden2025; Robertson Reference Robertson2022; Yeoh et al. Reference Yeoh, Lam, Somaiah and Acedera2023; Akinci Reference Akınci2023). Time matters in different ways in migrant women’s lives: (i) as a tool of control and governance by the state under temporary migration regimes, (ii) as lived experience through shifting social and emotional relationships to people and places over the life course, and (iii) as an anticipatory presence in relation to unknown futures.

Under temporary migration regimes in Asian contexts, time serves as a tool of ‘hierarchic governance’ (Cohen Reference Cohen2018; Munn Reference Munn1992, p. 2), which states use to limit a migrant’s right to dwell in its territory. Migrant workers are expected to conform to social norms in the societies in which they work, yet without recourse to permanent settlement (Prasetyo Reference Prasetyo2025). This creates conditions of long-term temporariness in places such as Singapore and Hong Kong, where migrants are kept as perpetual outsiders and never seen by the states that ‘host’ them as truly belonging, even when migrants stay and make social and economic contributions for decades. This condition of long-term temporariness and serial migration, as a cycle of migration that continually gets reproduced (Boersma Reference Boersma2019; Constable Reference Constable2014; Yeoh et al. Reference Yeoh, Lam, Somaiah and Acedera2023), is distinctive to the Asian contexts in which migrant domestic workers reside.

Following the same neoliberal logic, which requires ‘healthy bodies’ to uphold the economy, when migrant bodies age or become sick, they are seen by states as no longer productive – and thus disposable. As such, migrants are required to leave the country when their bodies age or when they reach retirement age. Such policies operate on a linear and chronological notion of distinct life stages and an unambiguous break between ‘working-age’ and ‘retirement-age’. Among the migrant women I did my research with in Singapore, turning sixty is something they all refer to: it is the age when the likelihood of the Singapore government denying their contract renewals goes up significantly (with exceptions only made on a case-by-case basis, subject to medical clearance and employer support) and it thus serves as an institutionally defined temporal threshold between their lives abroad, and their mandatory returns to their countries of origin.

Migrants’ own subjective experience of ageing is not always synchronized with the state’s temporal governance frameworks, or its perceptions of their ageing bodies, reflecting what Catherine Allerton (Reference Allerton2023) has called ‘discordant temporalities’ of migration. They are discordant in three key ways. First, even as migrant women recognize themselves growing older – their backs hurt a little more when they bend down to clean, they notice more wrinkles on their faces and find themselves feeling more tired – their own understandings of older-age and life transitions are not always aligned with the rigid notions of chronological age on which the state bases its policies. Many of the women I encountered say that they want to work ‘until I still can’, that their workloads are lighter since the children they raised in their employers’ households have moved out, that they are used to their routines and do not yet feel ‘too old’.

Second, migrant women often have to keep working given the precarious futures that await them post-retirement, despite decades of earning and sending home remittances. Their statements that they are still fit to work are double-edged, considering that the validity of their work permits is contingent on ‘good health’. Migrant domestic workers might extend their contracts to stay in Singapore as far as they can, seeking exceptions to the age limit with their employers’ support for their ‘indispensability’. This is because, as they age, there is a narrowing of possible alternate trajectories and a heightened concern about how they will sustain their livelihoods, about who will care for them, about negotiating autonomy and dependency, and about how to spend their time meaningfully. The very category of ‘retirement’, as one that emerges from European welfare states and civil service systems, does not often hold significance for the migrant women who continue to plan activities once they stop working abroad – whether these are income-generating activities or the continuation of unpaid care work. It is worth noting, moreover, that the precarity which migrant women confront in later life is a result of ‘cumulative disadvantage’ and experiences of precarity and underpaid care labour over the life course (Melo et al. Reference Melo, Guedes, Mendes, Gu and Dupre2019; Silvey and Parreñas Reference Silvey and Parreñas2019).

Third, migration plans, forms of belonging and aspirations shift over time and the life course, illuminating the important social and emotional dimensions of time. Migrant women develop connections, a sense of belonging, and familiarity in the places they work and live, despite the state’s exclusionary policies towards temporary migrants. Similarly, place changes over time, leading migrants to feel ambivalently connected – through both longing and alienation – to their countries of origin. As such, many domestic workers, who come to see Singapore and Hong Kong as home, do not feel ready to return at the state cut-off age. Even if they achieve their initially stated migration goals (such as building a house, or seeing children through university) before retirement age, many of the migrant women I worked with were in the process of pursuing newly defined life projects and aspirations in their fifties and sixties. While they often fulfilled their roles as breadwinners, daughters, and mothers in the earlier stages of their migration journeys, their priorities turn inwards in the later stages of their migration journeys: learning new skills, pursuing personal desires, and planning for the future. Their social and kinship roles change over time. The vital new life projects that domestic workers develop as they grow older abroad sit in tension with static definitions of old-age and retirement, echoing Jennifer Johnson-Hanks’ (Reference Johnson-Hanks2002) important argument that ‘“life stages” emerge only as the result of institutional projects, their coherence should be an object, rather than an assumption, of ethnographic inquiry’. Even as the state sees migrant workers as disposable workers who must leave at a certain age when their bodies are no longer young or healthy, their social and cultural lives far transcend this characterization, and migrant women find ways to manoeuvre around the state’s temporal controls.

1.3 Research Context

The sections that follow in this Element draw on ethnographic field research and interviews conducted with fifty migrant domestic workers of different nationalities between 2018 and 2024. The migrant women whose stories I draw on come primarily from the Philippines, as well as Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka. The domestic workers who participated in the study have been living and working in Singapore and Hong Kong for between eighteen and thirty-five years and span the middle to late-middle-aged range of forty-five to sixty-seven years old (see Table 1 in the Online Appendix).Footnote ⁷

I did most of my fieldwork with migrant domestic workers in Singapore. This started with fieldwork over a period of six months between 2018 and 2019, when I met my interlocutors and conducted extensive participant observation in the spaces where domestic workers of different nationalities socialize, such as shopping malls, religious spaces, a domestic workers’ clubhouse, at the decks of public housing blocks, parks, Sunday skills and financial education classes, and on online platforms such as Facebook. I occasionally met domestic workers within national group-oriented organizations for Filipino, Indonesian, and Indian domestic workers, respectively. The fieldwork was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2022. During this time, I maintained regular contact with key interlocutors through WhatsApp and followed online courses in which domestic workers participated and gathered material on how domestic workers represented their experience of the pandemic through vlogs on YouTube, Facebook posts, and live-streamed poetry readings. I then made periodic return visits to Singapore following the pandemic to follow-up with key interlocutors between 2022 and 2024.

This Element is also based on research conducted in Hong Kong between January and February 2020, where I interviewed domestic workers within financial education courses, in migrant advocacy groups, and in public spaces in Central (a key meeting spot for domestic workers on Sundays) through introductions from other domestic workers and organizations. In addition, I observed domestic workers’ protests and financial education trainings. The research in Hong Kong was cut short due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and while I was able to continue observing some of the courses online during this period, I did not have sufficient time in Hong Kong prior to the pandemic to sustain longer-term connections.

The final ethnographic section draws on my following the stories of migrant women who returned to their countries of origin, through a visit to Sri Lanka in January 2019 when invited by a key interlocutor, and through interviews with returnees to the Philippines (online) and India. In addition to spending time with domestic workers, I spoke with policy officers, co-operative, and NGO representatives working in the fields of migrant social protection and livelihoods in both Singapore and Hong Kong (see Table 2 in the Online Appendix). The Element further draws on analysis of policy documents on domestic workers’ rights, conditions of work, and social protection schemes in both origin and destination societies, and newspaper archives of domestic workers collected through the digital collections of Singapore’s National Library. Despite most of the fieldwork taking place in Singapore, I frame this work as being about the futures of domestic workers in ‘Asia’ more broadly to reflect the multiple fieldwork locations and their shared relevance to understanding this Element’s central question: who cares for the futures of migrant domestic workers who have long laboured under restrictive temporary migration regimes? Given the salience of transnational connections in migrant domestic workers’ lives, the broader framing of Asia further acknowledges how their expansive connections and imaginaries fundamentally shape their everyday lives.

1.4 Structure of the Element

Before going into the empirical material, the next section situates this particular case of ageing migrant domestic workers within a broader historical and comparative perspective on low-waged migrant labour. This includes a discussion of domestic workers (amahs) who moved within colonial labour regimes and how old-age was conceived of historically. Based on secondary sources, archival and policy documents, the section provides an overview of the political and economic structures and gendered constructions of labour that shape migrant workers’ presents and their ageing futures. This includes further insight into the contemporary temporary migration regimes in Asia and the Gulf, which depend on migrant workers as cheap labour to sustain economic growth, while expecting migrants to serve as development actors through their remittances, even upon retirement.

Section 3 then looks into questions of kinship, home, and belonging among an older generation of migrant domestic workers. It examines how migrant women establish a sense of home and belonging in Singapore and Hong Kong despite their restrictive conditions of work and mobility as temporary migrants. This sense of home is created through the close relations that they develop with their employers’ families, including the children that they help to raise over many years; in friendships with fellow migrants; and through the social and religious communities that they participate in. At the same time, they continue to live transnational family lives with their relationships to kin mediated through digital technologies and home visits. The prospect of mandatory return migration upon retirement generates profound emotional insecurities among migrant women as it threatens to disrupt this balance that migrant women have cultivated across their multiple homes. Looking to the future, migrant women feel uncertain about the extent to which they will be cared for by their kin in old-age, at the same time as they feel anxious about leaving behind their homes in Singapore and Hong Kong. This section examines these entanglements and ruptures of home, belonging, and place-making and contributes to an understanding of how migrants’ emotional connections shift over time.

In anticipation of retirement, migrant domestic workers engage in a range of planning initiatives for their future returns. Section 4 sheds light on how older domestic workers are taught to be innovative entrepreneurs when they return home at the end of their working lives abroad. They imagine and plan new businesses while investing in products of the global financial market. The section examines the introduction of financial actors into a landscape of future insecurity for domestic workers. It argues how these new financialized offerings, with their neoliberal focus on individual responsibility for one’s own future, reshape longer-standing expectations around dependence on kinship care in older-age.

The final ethnographic section tells the stories of migrant women who have returned to their countries of origin – the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and India – in retirement and sheds light on how hopes and anxieties about the future might play out in cases of actual return. The section focusses on sources of livelihood, kinship relations, and feelings of belonging among those who returned in later life. On a macro level, it examines the state-based initiatives, or lack thereof, which aim to support older returning migrants with ‘reintegration’ efforts. On a micro level, it provides an understanding of how migrants’ long-term journeys have translated into different forms of social mobility and the extent to which migrant women’s work abroad has transformed original circumstances of poverty and precarity. It further considers how their relationships to their homes have changed over time.

The final concluding section reflects on the key challenges facing older migrant domestic workers, as well as the opportunities they have for creatively shaping their futures amidst their restrictive socio-political circumstances. It offers recommendations for future research directions and policy-oriented considerations on the ageing futures of temporary migrant labour.

2.1 Temporary Migration Regimes: 1970s to the Present Day

Since the 1970s onwards, growing capitalist economies in Asia and the oil-rich Gulf sought ‘cheap’ low-waged labour, principally men, to work in construction industries and turned to international migrants to perform this manual labour. These movements of labour took place under contract labour migration schemes, where states receiving this labour set the terms of employment through highly restrictive temporary work permits predicated on keeping workers as transient presences. Meanwhile, sending states and intermediaries contributed to recruiting, training, and placing this labour into global capitalist circuits as a strategy for national development based on migrant worker remittances (valued at over US$350 billion to the Asia-Pacific region in 2023) (ABD, ILO, and OECD 2024). The Philippines offers the most explicit example of a highly institutionalized developmental state apparatus training and preparing its labour force for overseas work through its ‘labour export policy’, which has been in operation since the 1970s (Rodriguez Reference Rodriguez2010). State-based institutions operate alongside a large network of migration brokers and agents charging migrants large sums of money to organize their placements abroad, and creating a system wherein migrants begin their journeys in debt (Xiang and Lindquist Reference Xiang and Lindquist2014).

By the early 1980s, increased demand for domestic workers for childcare, cleaning, and cooking saw an increase in the number of female contract labour migrants (Piper Reference Piper2008). While the feminization of migration itself is not new (as the examples of amahs and ayahs demonstrate), the systematic organization of these labour movements under neoliberal temporary migration regimes is specific to international migration policy in Asia and the Gulf States over the past fifty years. The movements of migrant women from lower-income countries to higher-income countries has often been spoken of in the scholarship as ‘global care chains’ (Hochschild Reference Hochschild, W. Hutton and Giddens2000). Migrant women in turn depend on other women (either relatives or paid domestic workers in their countries of origin) to care for the children and kin who stay in the countries of origin.

The employment conditions for temporary migrant workers are highly restrictive.Footnote ⁹ In Singapore, migrant domestic workers arrive on renewable two-year ‘work permits’, which are not protected by national labour laws. They are required to live in their employers’ homes, which often entails occupying a small room at the back of employers’ apartments or houses. They are entitled to one statutory day off day per week (made mandatory only in 2013),Footnote ¹⁰ though in practice, some domestic workers get much less time off. Employers furthermore pay a ‘levy’ to the government for hiring a domestic worker, a sum that they will forfeit if the domestic worker goes missing, thereby giving employers more control over domestic workers’ mobilities (Koh et al. Reference Koh, Goh, Wee and Yeoh2017). Domestic workers are subjected to regular health checks, including compulsory pregnancy tests. A domestic worker who is pregnant will have her contract terminated, requiring her to return to her country of origin. Their families stay in their countries of origin, with no options for family reunification. In Hong Kong, domestic workers hold similar two-year, renewable contracts, with a live-in requirement (often in small, cramped spaces), and no option for permanent residency or family reunification. When domestic workers’ contracts are terminated, they have two weeks to leave Hong Kong (known as the ‘two-week rule’).Footnote ¹¹ Different to Singapore, domestic workers’ contracts are covered by local labour laws, there is a ‘minimum allowable wage’ for migrant domestic workers (significantly lower than the statutory minimum wage for all workers), and maternity protections but in practice, there remain numerous reports of exploitation (Al Jazeera Reference Jazeera2023). Sending states of domestic workers have attempted through diplomatic means and bilateral agreements to negotiate better conditions of work for overseas workers. The Philippines, for instance, stipulates that domestic workers sign contracts with a minimum salary of at least US$400,Footnote ¹² though salary deductions can still occur once the domestic worker has left the country.

These conditions must be situated in the broader context of restrictive immigration policies across several Asian societies, which offer limited pathways for migrants to secure permanent legal status or citizenship. The rationale behind these policies are multiple: some states, like Singapore, hold a cosmopolitan yet explicitly capitalist logic to bring in low-waged migrant workers to maximize economic gains, at the expense of labour rights, long-term residency and social protections; while other states, such as Japan, have sought to uphold the ethnonational boundaries of their populations by significantly restricting migration (until recently, where demographic and care needs have required opening up to migrants) (Hollifield and Sharpe Reference Hollfield and Sharpe2017; Lan Reference Lan2018). Migration regimes in East and Southeast Asia are different from those currently dominant in Europe, which are oriented to the often-contested process of ‘integrating’ migrant populations long-term through permanent residence and in some cases, citizenship (Adamson and Tsourapas Reference Adamson and Tsourapas2020), though even here, temporary migration schemes are once again gaining popularity (Bauböck and Ruhs Reference Bauböck and Ruhs2022).

In Singapore and Hong Kong, while low-waged migrants, like domestic workers, remain transient on paper, ‘highly-skilled’ migrants are given pathways to long-term residence (Yeoh Reference Yeoh2004). Domestic workers share the bottom-rung of temporary migration visas with other so-called ‘unskilled’ migrant workers, like the migrant men employed in the construction sector. Natasha Iskander (Reference Iskander2021), writing in the context of Qatar, with a similar migration regime, asks the pertinent question: ‘does skill make us human?’ She writes that ‘skill distinctions are used to limit freedom, narrow political rights, and even deny access to imagination and desire. Skill functions as a marker of social difference powerful enough to structure all aspects of social and economic life … [and that] skill categories adjudicate personhood’. In many respects, domestic workers under temporary labour migration regimes across Asia and the Gulf are the twenty-first century’s unfree labourers (Parreñas Reference Parreñas2021b).

The vast scholarship on migrant domestic work in Asia has illuminated both the structural conditions and forms of exploitation that characterize the sector, alongside migrant women’s agency. Scholars, for instance, have demonstrated how the contemporary migration industry, in conjunction with state agencies, train and produce ‘good’ workers: those who are docile, compliant, caring, and fit (see e.g., Guevarra Reference Guevarra2009; Killias Reference Killias2017; Rodriguez Reference Rodriguez2010). In the case of migrant women, we have come to understand through diverse ethnographies how processes of racialization and exploitation – by states, employers, and the wider society – keep migrants in situations of prolonged social exclusion, vulnerability, and precarity (Silvey and Parreñas Reference Silvey and Parreñas2019). These exclusions are produced through constant surveillance, processes of racial stereotyping, poor working and living conditions, or physical and mental abuse (see e.g., Constable Reference Constable2007; HOME and Liberty Shared 2019; Johnson et al. Reference Johnson, Lee, McCahill and Mesina2020; Parreñas Reference Parreñas2021b). As a counterpoint, the scholarship on migrant labour importantly demonstrates how migrant women respond with complex expressions of resistance, agency, and aspiration, as they make sense of their migrant journeys as moral and spiritual projects and cultivate meaningful relationships and communities. This side of the story is equally important to tell as it signals a richness to their lives and subjectivities beyond a narrative of victimization and exploitation (Chan Reference Chan2018; Constable Reference Constable2007; Johnson and Werbner Reference Johnson and Werbner2010; Paul Reference Paul2017). Agency and vulnerability often coexist in domestic workers’ lives.

2.2 Ageing Labour in the Contemporary Period

Even as domestic workers might renew their temporary contracts over many years, there are temporal limits to these renewals, marked by retirement age. ‘Retirement’ for domestic workers in Singapore is set at the age of sixty, though domestic workers’ contracts can still be renewed after this age subject to their clearing a health check-up and their employers making a case for their indispensability to the family. Even here, these renewals are not indefinite, and migrant domestic workers are eventually required to return to their countries of origin.

In the scholarship on contemporary contract migrant labour regimes in Asian and Middle Eastern contexts, there has been far less sustained attention to ageing migrant labour. In earlier debates on global ageing in international fora, expert discussions tended to focus more on the figure of the ageing, white, male worker (Sivaramakrishnan Reference Sivaramakrishnan2018), leaving little room for discussion on the ageing futures of labourers in the Global South, let alone female workers. Such debates nonetheless revealed varied approaches to how we might define ‘ageing’ in different socio-cultural and regional contexts. Is it to be defined in terms of chronological age and based on institutional definitions of old-age and retirement thresholds? Or rather a question of bodily incapacity and dependency? (Sivaramakrishnan Reference Sivaramakrishnan2014).

Comparative examples of ageing labourers in other contexts offer insightful perspectives. Sarah Horton (Reference Horton2016), in her ethnography on Latino farmworkers in California, for example, reminds us that a ‘farmworker’s life course does not follow the uniform trajectory of [ageing] assumed by the standard retirement age established by federal authorities’. She asserts that ‘a farmworker’s body “finishes” well before the official retirement age’ and that ‘physical disability often long precedes the federal government’s official certification of the condition’ (Reference Horton2016, pp. 79, 160). In this sense, receiving federal disability assistance rather than retirement payments ‘more frequently marks the end of a career in the fields’ and there are subtle yet consequential differences between the terms desabilitarse (to be deemed disabled), jubilarse (to retire), and pensionarse (to receive a pension) (Horton Reference Horton2016, p. 159). In another example, retired plantation workers in Kerala who laboured for forty years had their end of employment payouts deferred by plantation companies, leading to an extreme sense of injustice, alienation, and a loss of status among retirees who were waiting for death and unable to live a dignified old-age (Raj Reference Raj2020). Meanwhile, domestic workers in the US and Canada continue working well past official ‘retirement’ age to sustain their livelihoods (Ferrer Reference Ferrer2017; Parreñas Reference Parreñas2015). In Europe, John Berger and Jean Mohr (Reference Berger and Mohr1975, p. 68) noted that ‘migrant workers do not age; they do not get tired; they do not die. They have a single function: to work’, a statement reflecting how states perceived migrant labourers only in terms of their labour power and fitness to work. The Gastarbeiter (guest worker) schemes from the 1950s–1970s had intended to be temporary migration schemes, but as many workers stayed on, states shifted the focus to thorny questions around belonging, with many former guest workers still experiencing discrimination despite formal residence or citizenship. Most of them did indeed grow old in the countries in which they worked. Palmberger (Reference Palmberger2016), in her study of older Turkish-origin workers in Austria, observes that ‘age’ per se was less important than one’s life stage. Many of her informants had retired early due to physical injuries, and retirement reflected a new stage of life for trying out transnational living arrangements, to the extent possible given the limits imposed by Austrian welfare policies, where being outside of the country for long periods of time would mean risking retirement payments.

These comparative examples of ageing low-waged labourers in other precarious contexts demonstrate how institutionally defined categories (‘retirement’, for example) or linear conceptualizations of ageing do not always reflect embodied experiences of age, body, work, and life transitions (see also Coe Reference Coe2016; Johnson-Hanks Reference Johnson-Hanks2002; Lynch and Danely Reference Lynch and Danely2013). Some labourers are forced to defer retirement, while others finish work prematurely due to disability. In the case of domestic workers in Singapore, a worker’s worth comes from being youthful, ‘fit’, and ‘productive’. The ageing body strips away one’s economic value and worth. Yet, the institutionally defined retirement age does not always correspond with workers’ own sense of fitness or bodily ability and strength. Among the women in my study, there were mixed feelings about their own ageing bodies. Some said they were ready to rest after many years of hard work, while others said they still felt youthful and able to work. As Margie, a domestic worker in Singapore who is over sixty years old says affirmatively, ‘I still feel young! My health is better now. I can see that I never get any headaches anymore because I now know how to look after myself and to have a good heart’. Margie talks about how drinking a lot of water and getting good sleep is her secret for feeling young even as she gets older in chronological age. She sometimes uses an app to erase her wrinkles when sending photos to her family, echoing her desire to feel youthful. Margie wants to keep working in Singapore until her employers no longer need her. In Margie’s case, her work is important to her sense of self and identity, and she holds the conviction that remaining active is more important than being idle to slow down the ageing process. Sometimes this continued need to work is driven by an ongoing precarity and a lack of savings, and the need to feel young and healthy to prolong one’s employment and livelihood. Regardless of how migrant domestic workers feel, eventual retirement becomes synonymous with return migration, making questions around social protection in contexts of return migration pertinent.

2.3 Social Protections for Ageing Migrant Domestic Workers

While sending states provide a certain degree of social protection for migrant workers through pre-departure trainings, institutions for workers’ welfare needs, and protecting migrants from labour abuses (see e.g., Chang Reference Chang2021; Ireland Reference Ireland2018; Parreñas Reference Parreñas2021c), questions around ageing, social security, and retirement are far less visible in state social protection schemes.Footnote ¹³ In the countries where migrants work, retirement is implicitly understood as a matter for older migrant workers to deal with in their countries of origin, either privately through the care and support of kin or through state schemes. Domestic workers in Singapore, for instance, are not permitted to contribute to the Central Provident Fund or entitled to formal social security or post-employment payouts upon retirement. In Hong Kong, long-term domestic workers are entitled to a ‘long-service’ payment from their employer, which the employer pays when they finally terminate the worker’s contract or when the domestic worker resigns over the age of sixty-five or due to ill health. Domestic workers who terminate their contracts sooner are not automatically entitled to it, which sometimes leads to a situation of domestic workers continuing to work even when they are ready to stop and return home.Footnote ¹⁴ In broader public debates in Asia, there is recognition that women’s caring work is undervalued in social security frameworks, leading to gendered precarity in older-age (see e.g., Harding et al. Reference Harding, Baquero Geronimo and Bezbaruah2018). However, such debates do not include migrant women. Meanwhile, ‘active’, ‘successful’, and ‘healthy’ ageing campaigns in Singapore (where older people are encouraged to take responsibility for their own longevity) are targeted at Singapore citizens and permanent residents, with domestic workers’ role only acknowledged as caregivers for elderly Singaporeans. Their own ageing futures are seen as something to be dealt with elsewhere once their labour is no longer needed in the city-state, a reminder again of the neoliberal valuing of only ‘healthy’ bodies.

In terms of formal social protection in migrants’ countries of origin, the Philippines is unique with its formalized Social Security Scheme (SSS). This contributory scheme is open to migrants and was made mandatory in 2018.Footnote ¹⁵ The SSS covers sickness, maternity, and disability benefits, loans for housing (in partnership with PAG-IBIG, another state-organized housing loan entity, and PhilHealth, the state health insurance), as well as pensions. For the generation of workers retiring now, contributing to the SSS had been optional. The Philippine Embassy attaché responsible for this scheme at the time of my fieldwork in 2019 explained in an interview that only 5 per cent of overseas Filipinos, mostly domestic workers, were paying into it at the time. Workers have to pay into the scheme for a minimum of ten years but the more they put in, the more they get back once they are sixty years old or older. The officer explained, based on her experience abroad, that some domestic workers may only start paying into it at the age of 55, and therefore only accrue benefits at the age of sixty-five, while others forget to make regular payments and or fear that contributing will put them into debt.

Like the Philippine model, Sri Lanka announced the introduction of a new contributory pension scheme, ‘Manusavi’,Footnote ¹⁶ in 2022, for which migrant workers are eligible, in recognition of the need for social security in later life for returning migrants. However, this scheme had not been implemented in time for the current generation of ageing migrant women who participated in my study. In Indonesia, as my interlocutors mention, ‘pension’ is a term associated with civil servants or government employees, not one they associate with themselves as migrant domestic workers. Indonesian domestic workers can opt in to a voluntary government scheme, Badan Penyelenggara Jaminan Sosial (BPJS),Footnote ¹⁷ which provides a pension plan, but few domestic workers know about it. Meanwhile, in India, at a national level, there are no social security schemes specifically for transnational migrant returnees, with a voluntary pension scheme having been discontinued in 2017 (Burmeister-Rudolph Reference Burmeister-Rudolph2023). Those living under the poverty line may be eligible for payoutsFootnote ¹⁸ for older adults as a ‘vulnerable’ population, though the implementation and amounts vary from state to state. Migrant returnees are more likely to belong to the ‘missing middle’, those ‘who don’t fall under most government schemes and have meagre savings for their later years’ (The Hindu 2024), while unable to pay for privatized retirement options that wealthier citizens and diasporas can afford (Lamb Reference Lamb2024). In one notable exception, the state of Kerala, which has a large non-resident population (with many ‘temporary’ migrants in the Gulf states), is the first subnational state to institutionalize and recognize the importance of social protection, including pensions, for international and return migrants (Burmeister-Rudolph Reference Burmeister-Rudolph2023). This signals the potential new role of subnational actors in the social protection of migrant workers.Footnote ¹⁹

The few existing options are rarely enough for migrant domestic workers to sustain their livelihoods later in life, which has led to migrant women relying on a ‘patchwork’ of uncertain social protection measures combining formal schemes, kin-based care, faith-oriented, and peer-support networks (Levitt et al. Reference Levitt, Dobbs, Sun and Paul2023). Section 4 examines how uncertainty about the future prompts some domestic workers to enrol in business and financial education programmes to try and secure their future livelihoods through new income-generating schemes. Entrepreneurship is another key pillar in the relatively recent but expanding ‘return and reintegration’ programmes for migrant returnees (see Section 6).

Beyond questions of social protection in later life, there are significant emotional questions associated with long-term migration, which makes kinship care less straightforward an option than it might appear. I address these emotional and financial questions in the subsequent ethnographic sections, highlighting the significant challenges that migrant domestic workers face when approaching older-age, even as they express their agency and develop aspirations for meaningful futures. The stories ahead demonstrate that older-age may be a time of precarity and anxiety for low-waged workers, but not exclusively a story of passivity and decline.

3.1 Domestic Work Over Time: Establishing Kinship

In accordance with the logic of temporary migration regimes, a number of migrant domestic workers echo that their stays abroad are temporary, that their separation from kin can be justified for a short period of time while they earn money to remit back for familial needs and futures. The early days of their migration journeys often confirm this perception, with many domestic workers experiencing homesickness and dealing with difficult employers who constrict or surveil their mobilities and limit the number of days off they have per month. Limited mobilities are further tied to the forms of debt that migrant domestic workers hold when arriving in Singapore due to high fees that are paid to intermediaries who broker their journeys. As Platt et al. (Reference Platt, Baey, Yeoh, Khoo and Lam2016) argue, more research on the role of debt in the lives of migrant workers is much needed, given that it characterizes their lives significantly and at different stages of their journeys. Marisol, a domestic worker who has been in Singapore for eighteen years, explained: ‘when I first arrived in Singapore, my off day was once a month but I didn’t go out because you need to pay 4 months’ salary deduction. That’s a very low salary, just $320 [per month] and I still had to buy my toiletries, soap, my personal things. So instead of going out, I stayed at home.’ Debt and the need to keep earning, plays a role in migrant women extending their temporary contracts repeatedly, as it takes time to even start sending remittances. A number of the women I interviewed often thought, as Ria put it, ‘maybe 5 years, that’s enough’ before realizing that their stays far exceeded their initial time frames for working abroad. The women I spoke with unanimously agreed that the early days required hard work and strength to ‘bear the pain’, to ‘patiently live through that’, and to ‘fight’.

Over time, domestic workers build networks with others in a similar situation and may move out of difficult employment situations by leaving exploitative employers and by looking for ‘good employers’. Given how much power employers hold over domestic workers’ conditions of life and work abroad, the difference between an accommodating or abusive employer can significantly shape domestic workers’ trajectories. It must be said that not all domestic workers are able to easily leave abusive employment situations. Their debt and isolation can prevent them from building networks of support (HOME and Liberty Shared 2019), and there is no standardized linear trajectory out of debt and abuse into positive employment situations. The stories that follow of long-term domestic workers do not represent all domestic workers’ experiences. Some remain in challenging employment situations, return earlier to their countries of origin, or move on to other destinations.

According to my interlocutors who do stay on and build supportive networks, a ‘good employer’ is one who treats them ‘like family’. Despite the demarcations in living space which keep domestic workers separate within the household, live-in domestic workers become deeply familiar with the lives of their employers’ families, spending at least six days a week in their homes, day and night. Domestic work, by its very nature, is intimate work: it requires living with others, touching bodies, feeding others, and caring for them. Establishing close relationships with employers’ families is a process that unfolds over time, in and through these everyday interactions.

Women with long-term employers who treat them as kin talk about how indispensable they are to the family, and of their mutual interdependence and affection for one another, challenging the state’s categorization of migrant temporary workers as ‘dispensable’. Through these intimacies, domestic workers find some recognition of their personhood. Equally, as much of the literature has examined, to treat domestic workers ‘like kin’ can be a strategy for further exploitation where employers might, for instance, emotionally coax a domestic worker to give up her day off, or holidays, to take care of the children or grandparents in the house. Domestic workers might leverage this sense of closeness themselves to make subtle claims on employers to financially support the building of a house for kin back home, for emergencies, or to contribute to paying for skills courses or their retirement fund. Building close relationships with their employers’ families is further bound up with domestic workers maintaining kin relationships in their countries of origin. A ‘good employer’ is one who recognizes the relationships and obligations that domestic workers have to their siblings, parents, and or/children, and being supportive of their multiple obligations. In these employment-kin relations, the dynamics might oscillate between care and control, and forms of reciprocity and inequality, as the stories of Rose, Kumari, and Jana, all long-term domestic workers, demonstrate.

3.2 Rose, Kumari, and Jana

Rose has been working for the same employer in Singapore for over thirty years. She raised the children in the family she has worked for since her early days in Singapore, children who are now adults and have moved away. Rose herself has been ageing in Singapore while taking care of her ageing employers. Rose spoke of her female employer as a sister with whom she could talk about anything, including her unfaithful husband and her separation from him, which brought her much pain and gave her little reason to go back to the Philippines to the judgement of extended kin. Despite being over sixty, the official retirement age, her employers managed to renew her work permit beyond this age. Rose would regularly accompany her employer, who had compounding health problems, to hospital appointments. They kept each other company, and Rose knew exactly what meals to cook for her. When her female employer passed away, Rose was distraught and told me in detail what had happened that day, feeling helpless about how it all unfolded. She is now alone with her male employer, who depends on Rose for his everyday sustenance. Though they occupy different spaces within the household, he and Rose share solitude and grief. The state, however, has already decided that she cannot stay in Singapore indefinitely as a domestic worker, while she too reflects on whether it is finally time to return to her original home. Rose has some land which is used to cultivate rice and generate a basic income, but she worries, as a now-single woman, whether her nieces and nephews will support her old-age care.

Rose’s story is not atypical, but one that I heard echoed in the narratives of other long-term domestic workers. Kumari, a Tamil domestic worker has been living in Singapore for thirty years, helped raise the three children in her employer’s household. The children lost their mother when they were young, and Kumari stepped in to help their father raise them. Kumari is particularly close to the boy who was born after she arrived; she reflects on how she used to pacify him as a baby, and she has shared a room with him since his mother died. Meanwhile, Kumari had fraught relationships and struggles with her kin in Tamil Nadu: her husband suffered from a disability caused by polio and eventually passed away, and she was cheated by her eldest daughter and son, who squandered the money she sent back to them and mishandled the house she built with her savings. Her employer (whom she calls ‘Anna’, or older brother in Tamil) and his extended family supported some of the expenses for her daughters’ weddings and family emergencies. Over these years, she balanced her commitment to her ‘Singapore family’, whom she knew intimately, at the same time as dealing with these family crises and events in India. When it was time for her to leave Singapore at close to sixty years of age and return to Chennai permanently, Kumari was deeply emotional about it. The only thing that would give her peace of mind, she proclaimed, was knowing that ‘this house is peaceful. I thought I would stay here until death’. With only a few months of her salary saved, along with some gold jewellery, she lamented, ‘I’ve given everything away, I have nothing’. Kumari’s plan was to return to Tamil Nadu to live with her youngest daughter (the only one she trusts) and to spend time with her grandchildren but she worries about her relationship with her other children and how she will be looked after upon her return.

A third example is Jana, drawn from the research conducted in Hong Kong, which has similar conditions of work as in Singapore. Jana is a former nurse in the Philippines who moved to work as a domestic worker in Hong Kong thirty-one years ago. Jana reflected that she had not expected to stay in Hong Kong for so long but as a single mother, she had to support her children through their school education and through college. Over the years, Jana noticed that she lacks a sense of intimacy in her relationship with her children ‘the love, the touch, the presence’. Jana explained, ‘I tell my friends, I don’t feel close to my children, what will I do if I go back? I am all alone there. They tell me, we are all experiencing this, we also feel apart from our children – you must prepare for yourself now, not later, not when you are too old’. Even as Jana’s children reassure her otherwise, she feels more at home in her ‘second home’, Hong Kong, and the relationships she has built there, particularly with the dogs she has been looking after in her previous and current employers’ homes. Jana said, ‘it is another very difficult thing to leave the dog’, talking fondly about how the dog used to sleep in her bed with her. She takes them to the dog park daily and up to the terrace when she eats her lunch. Her relationship with these animals as companions is part of what keeps her in Hong Kong. She wants to stay in Hong Kong with her new employers for as long as she can.

The cases of Rose, Kumari, and Jana remind us to take seriously the emotional ruptures that ageing domestic workers face after building long-term relationships with employers’ families when they have to return to their countries of origin. These intimacies are often fragile, something that becomes very clear at the end of employment relationships. As Cati Coe and I have argued (2022), the flexible registers of kinship that characterize care workers’ relationships with their employers revert, at the end of employment, to fixed notions of kinship. Essentialist understandings of kinship arise around inheritance and the worker’s care in older-age and in illness, enabling employers, states, and care agencies to avoid post-employment obligations to domestic workers. Some employers, like Kumari’s, continue to stay in touch and have promised to look out for her and support her, having visited her youngest daughter in Chennai before Kumari’s return to be sure that she would be okay. Other domestic workers’ relationships to employers might end more abruptly or entail betrayal, leading to an absence of support or communication when domestic workers return to their countries of origin. An example is of Cris, a domestic worker who spent years with a family raising their son with disabilities, only to have her contract terminated abruptly when she developed high blood pressure and related health concerns. Cris’ experience is reflective of a labour migration regime that is not set up to support workers with chronic health concerns given the limited coverage of health insurance and domestic workers’ non-resident and non-citizen status. Not all long-term domestic workers’ relationships are therefore harmonious; some remain difficult and may fluctuate between more positive relations and more conflictual periods where domestic workers end up in the position of being ‘neither family nor employee’ (AWARE & HOME 2020). Even close relationships depend on the fundamental inequalities that underpin the care work economy and the labour of low-waged migrant women. Kinship with employers cannot always stand in as long-term sources of social protection in their old age, with many domestic workers still expected to rely on their savings and their original kin for care and support.

3.3 Place-Making and Self-Transformations

3.3.2 Faith and Service

Faith is another space offering support to migrant women in confronting the challenges over the course of their migrant journeys, contributing to their sense of home abroad, while preparing them for their unknown futures. The migrant women in my study belong to different faiths, including Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and different denominations of Christianity. Hema from Sri Lanka, for instance, finds solace and creative energy from Singapore’s multicultural religious landscape. She spends Sundays at the Sri Lankan Buddhist temple, praying under the bodhi tree, cooking, and serving fellow Sri Lankan migrants, as well as Chinese Buddhists in Singapore (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

Hema on one of her regular visits to the temple and its Bodhi tree (photo by author).

On Tuesdays and Fridays, on the way to the market, Hema stops off to pray to the Goddess Durga – a goddess representing female power – in a Hindu temple in the Singapore heartlands. Every week, Hema takes a photograph of the goddess to send to her WhatsApp contacts, as a gesture of care and connection. In the Hindu temple, she shares space with diverse others carrying out the rituals of prayer. As someone who holds multiple faiths, she is highly synchronized with the rituals of Singaporean and other migrant Hindus, even if these are fleeting interactions rather than enduring community relationships. The religious syncretism of Singapore is something that Hema has embraced in her decades of work in the country, and these moments of shared experience contribute to her sense of home. Carrying out her spiritual rituals fuels her imaginaries for a good future as she approaches retirement: being a good, virtuous person and praying to many different gods are what will support her in the time ahead. In addition to these temple visits, Hema volunteers regularly at a clubhouse for domestic workers on Sundays, where she has built friendships with both local and domestic worker volunteers of different nationalities.

Faith has been a pillar for Dasuni too, another domestic worker from Sri Lanka who has been in Singapore for the past twenty-five years. She came from Sri Lanka to earn money for her family and to support her daughter’s educational aspirations in medicine. Her time in Singapore has also been important to her personally as she underwent a spiritual transformation from being Buddhist to converting to Christianity. Dasuni explained that God ‘touched’ her and took away her burdens at a time when she was going through financial difficulties. She spends her Sundays going to a Church which offers a service in Sinhalese, preparing tea, ushering people into the service, and arranging the hall. She said that ‘before I became Christian, I was in the worldly way – just going out eating, going to the park, meeting my friends. But since 2009, I am in the Church. I go to Church from 8 am until 8 pm. I want to have more opportunities to serve the Lord’. Since her conversion, Dasuni feels at peace. Her family in Sri Lanka was initially sad when she told them of her religious conversion, but they now recognize that she still cares about them and sends money home to build a house. Even as Dasuni misses her family in Sri Lanka, she worries about going back. As she put it, ‘I am used to living this life. Here I am living a good life, I am earning money, everything is comfortable. I will miss Singapore, I will miss the Church, I will miss this family [her employer’s family], they are very good and take care of me’. Dasuni’s story illuminates how migrant domestic workers build a sense of home while abroad, and how faith can play a central role in this process of home-making. Despite being anxious about her future life back in Sri Lanka, she is certain that she will continue with her spiritual engagements and service to her faith, something which offers a potential bridge between her present and future.

Beyond faith, volunteering is a common activity among older migrant women. Lena and her friends, all domestic workers in Singapore for more than twenty years, have been active volunteers at a migrant NGO, helping women at the shelter who run away from their employers, and repaying the help they received from others when they were new to Singapore. With the support of this NGO, these women additionally spend their Sundays volunteering at local nursing homes and at the Singapore disability association, Lena saying how much they enjoy this work of helping others and making a difference. On her encounters with elder Singaporeans in the nursing home, Lena reflects: ‘of course we bond with them because they are our friends, we are there for each other, they are longing for their family, and so are we’. Much of this work gives them a sense of purpose, fosters connections and forms of companionship with Singaporeans of diverse backgrounds, while offering opportunities to gain new skills for their futures beyond domestic work.

3.4 Endings: Emotional Ruptures in Long-Term Migration Journeys

In response to the guest worker schemes in Europe of the 1960s, Swiss writer Max Frisch (cited in Lyon Reference Lyon2015) famously wrote: ‘We asked for workers. We got people instead’. In a similar vein, temporary migration regimes are based on the logic of attracting workers for economic gain, overlooking their embeddedness in social, cultural, and familial life, their everyday citizenship practices even in the absence of formal citizenship or long-term residency rights, and the meaningful relationships and connections they build with people across the country. As Nicole Constable (Reference Constable2014, p. 7) notes in the Hong Kong context, ‘migrant workers are never only workers’.

Time is central to shaping these social and emotional connections, which unfold slowly over years through repeated everyday encounters. As Singapore promotes a narrow vision of the nuclear family unit, which migrant care workers uphold through their caring labour, migrant women expand notions of kinship and establish connections through religious and organizational spaces, crossing boundaries and forming solidarities, even if in fleeting ways. These encounters provide small openings for reimagining their precarious positions in hierarchical social fields and restoring their sense of personhood, albeit unevenly and always in contexts of power differences. These encounters further shape domestic workers’ cultural knowledge and familiarity with the societies in which they live and work.

Time as a form of governance further limits continuities in these relationships. State policies that require domestic workers to return to their countries of origin upon retirement mean that these meaningful connections and forms of place-making unfold in this particular time and space of being in Singapore together, and rarely beyond. While domestic worker activism is curtailed in Singapore, there have been sporadic efforts among domestic workers in Hong Kong (where activism is more prominent) to make legal claims to long-term residence on the grounds of their long years of work, their contributions, and their sense of belonging. Ten years ago, a long-term domestic worker went to court (in the case Vallejos Evangeline Banao v Commissioner of Registration), arguing that she had the ‘Right to Abode’ (permanent residence) because she fulfilled the criteria of having resided in Hong Kong for seven years. The Court of Final Appeal ruled that domestic workers are not entitled to the Right of Abode as their stays in Hong Kong as temporary migrants do not qualify as ‘ordinary residence’. This attempt to stay and to counter the laws that exclude permanent residence pathways of temporary workers, therefore failed.

Following many years of work, domestic workers come to see places like Singapore or Hong Kong as home. While some domestic workers express happiness about the prospect of reconnecting with their original kin after many years of separation, others remain hesitant about these reunions. The inability to continue their transnational lives, due to the lack of possibilities to stay and retire abroad, generates profound anxieties about their future relationships and their sense of place and belonging when they return to their original homes, given that they have changed, and these places too have changed over time. Future-making for domestic workers is therefore a process of conflicting emotions and feelings. These emotions sit alongside the financial anxieties that migrant domestic workers hold in a context of limited savings and social protections. The next section explores how they make plans for retirement, imagine their future livelihoods, and experiment with new financialized ideas to assure future security in older-age.

4.1 Financial Basics and Business Plans

Some of the originally conceived financial education courses start with basic modules on saving and budgeting one’s weekly expenses, categorizing remittances according to ‘fixed monthly amounts’ and ‘emergencies’, providing lessons on how to open a savings account, how to avoid debt, and to be wary of unscrupulous money-lenders. The lessons emphasize evaluating needs and priorities with questions like: ‘Is a mobile phone a need or a want?’, with most responding that it is a need, an essential tool in transnational familial communication, followed by the question ‘is an iPhone a need or a want?’, with most agreeing it is a ‘want’. Some sessions focus on ‘being assertive’ and ‘confident communication’, with the goal to boost the self-confidence of domestic workers so that they can stand up to the demands of others, be it employers or kin. There is recognition of migrant women’s future precarity, and one goal of such institutions is to provide opportunities for women to build more secure futures through learning how to set up and manage a business. In the more advanced modules, domestic workers present their business plans to each other, discussing whether a beauty salon or catering business would make more sense in their home villages, saturated as they are with small businesses.

The women on these courses are at different stages of planning their future businesses. Some have exciting ideas without having thought about the nitty-gritty details of running a business – among them, a campsite getaway for city-dwellers in the Philippine countryside, a travel agency, a computer literacy centre, and a catering service. Others are well on their way to making concrete plans in collaboration with relatives and friends back home.

Carla, a student enrolled in a business management course, noted that ‘some [of her compatriots] go home with nothing. … they did not think about their future’. Carla is in her late 40s and still far away from ‘retirement’. But she is attending the business modules offered by a financial education NGO with the plan to set up a ‘Three Sisters International Cuisine’ restaurant when she returns to the Philippines, in partnership with her sisters as the restaurant name signifies. Carla explained:

She says that they have the land and they are thinking about how to acquire the wood to build the furniture. There are still some details to work out – particularly the question of who is going to run this restaurant while they are all still abroad – but this is a vision she is actively working on.

Other students in the course, like Jiji, already have experience of running small businesses in their countries of origin. Jiji previously had a business selling fruits and vegetables, but because these were perishable products, there was significant wastage, which led her and her husband to close it down. Based on this prior experience, Jiji now has two further ideas: first, a pet food shop for cats, rabbits, and roosters, because pet food is ‘not so fast to spoil’ in case one does not make immediate sales. And second, a money changer business. Jiji reflects that ‘a lot of people in my hometown are working abroad, but the money changer is very far from my village’. She has not worked out the details of how to get a license from the government to operate such a business and how to come up with a large deposit to set it up, but she is taking the business modules in the financial education NGO to develop her ideas and plans. Jiji explains that pensions in Indonesia are only for civil servants: ‘Most other people have to keep working. And that’s why I tell my husband, because we have no pension in our old-age, we need to have enough savings for our future’. Her plan is to keep working in Singapore to save money for these business plans, knowing that this may still not be enough to support her family after she retires.

Scholars of migration have demonstrated that plans for small business ventures do not always succeed (Parreñas Reference Parreñas2021a; Spitzer Reference Spitzer2016), and livelihoods become unsustainable. This was echoed in the story of one of the students on the course that I met, Jenny, who recounted:

For younger migrants, going abroad again when things do not work out after an attempted return is a common feature in migrant domestic workers’ trajectories (Constable Reference Constable1999; Parreñas Reference Parreñas2021a). For older migrant women who are returning in retirement, the option to go abroad again is not available, making the stakes higher for business ventures to work out. The Philippine state, which has devised a number of schemes and competitions as part of their reintegration and entrepreneurship programme for returning migrants, has similarly recognized that many of these new businesses do not succeed. In response, in 2023, the Department of Migrant Workers and the Department of Trade and Industry launched a new business and training mentorship programme for returning migrants, the secretary of the programme calling this a ‘handholding’ scheme for migrants entering business (Abad Reference Abad2023). Such initiatives, however, do not consider the specific age-related challenges of setting up a new business in retirement, nor do they compensate migrants’ life-long contributions through remittances and social security contributions through livelihood-sustaining social protection schemes. Entrepreneurship initiatives reinforce the idea that migrants, including returning migrants in later life, ought to be productive contributors to the country’s development, placing the burden on returning migrants to find new, income-generating livelihoods upon retirement from work abroad.

4.2 Financialization and Shifting ‘Mindsets’

While business planning and financial education foundations are the focus of some financial literacy organizations, others take an approach that is more in line with global financialization processes: the increasing shift towards market logics, and the growing prevalence of financial products in people’s everyday lives, decisions, and perceptions of risk in contexts of social inequality (Nguyen et al. Reference Nguyen, Ryndstrom and Mao2024). As one trainer from a corporate financial organization said, ‘savings is not enough. We need more financial freedom’, explaining to domestic workers that the value of their money will go down if it stays in the bank account and that they should be ready to invest it and to take risks, even with small monthly contributions. The more corporate-oriented sessions seek to tap into the ‘financial potential’ of domestic workers as investors. In some regions of the world (e.g., Dubai), such initiatives target middle-class professionals more than domestic workers as they are thought to hold greater financial power (Banta and Pratt Reference Banta and Pratt2021). The organizations and initiatives I encountered in Singapore and Hong Kong do include domestic workers, who typically have lower wages but are increasingly receptive to investment opportunities given their precarious futures. The products in question here are insurances, investments into stocks, mutual funds, and property-as-investments (e.g., condominium units in the metropoles) in migrant women’s countries of origin. This investment-oriented financial education is particularly prominent among Filipino migrants, where private real-estate fairs, for instance, are organized in conjunction with state agencies offering housing loans.

One session that I attended was run by young professionals from a large multinational corporation in their offices in downtown Hong Kong (and in partnership with an NGO), using their Sundays for this ‘corporate social responsibility’ activity. Domestic workers spent four hours sitting in the comfortable air-conditioned offices of this corporation listening to PowerPoint presentations on ‘what is insurance?’, and how to choose the right insurance products based on one’s stage in life (see Figure 3). The participants were then sent into break-out sessions to brainstorm different risks and future scenarios with the ‘takeaway’ lesson being that insurance is worth investing in.

Figure 3

Domestic workers in Hong Kong attending a financial education course on insurance (photo by author).

In addition to seminars like these on insurance, there are offerings for seminars on investments in real estate and stocks, with lessons on how to distinguish scams from legitimate financial products. One book that circulates among Filipino migrants is Vince Rapisura’s 2016 handbook ‘(L)earning Wealth Successful Strategies in Money Management’. The book is all about earning a ‘passive income’, where ‘you earn even if you do not work’. ‘Sir Vince’, as he is known, is a motivational speaker, and his finance guidebook outlines the different stages to ‘financial freedom’. The book offers guidelines on investing and goal-setting, and is peppered with motivational quotes specific to the Filipino migrant experience. He argues that the emotions that migrants hold – fear and guilt, for example, in not letting their families down – holds them back from the ‘self-mastery’ that financial freedom requires and that one is ultimately responsible for one’s own happiness and wealth. Older migrant domestic workers, some of whom take in these messages, have laboured abroad for most of their adult lives on precarious incomes and have sent their earnings as remittances to support their familial needs and futures in education, housing, and health. The advice suggesting that they have not been doing enough thus feels at odds with their labour.

These messages nevertheless resonate with some of my interlocutors who see retirement as a life phase of dependency on others (be it the state or kin) to be undesirable, and even shameful. Financial education is framed by some migrant women as an ethically transformative journey. This is echoed in the taglines of many of the programmes offered: ‘invest in yourself’, ‘investors and innovators’, and ‘dare to dream’. Lisa, who is now an ambassador for a financial education NGO in Hong Kong, spoke of her transformation as someone without a plan to someone with a goal. Lisa reflected that ‘you really need planning because if you don’t plan, you plan to fail … this is what they say. … I attended a lot of classes about self-improvement and then I realized what is missing is really the vision of when I’m going to finish [working in Hong Kong]’. Lisa now spends her time convincing her domestic worker compatriots that they need to enrol in these courses too. But she protests that many do not want to listen: ‘“I think about it later” – that’s what they always say, I still have a lot of expenses. But when are you going to think about it? Because you really have to’. Similar sentiments were shared during a group discussion I held with a group of Filipina domestic workers who had attended the aforementioned corporate training on insurances. One of the women in the group said: ‘We try to make our time productive. Now there are livelihood programmes, financial education classes. All this is new, we did not have this before’ and ‘we have to study and do research about all the financial products … we have to know which ones are good, or suitable for our needs, that’s why we come to these classes’. Together, they reflected that the ‘ideal retirement’ for them is ‘to be financially stable, to buy what we need, to be healthy, to travel, if that is God’s will. If we are financially stable, then we can be worry free. If we get a passive income, then we can just enjoy life’.

This group, as well as Lisa, distinguish themselves morally as those seeking to use their time wisely and productively from those who ‘just sit around’, referring to the women in downtown Hong Kong who sit on cardboard boxes. As one domestic worker at the insurance course said, ‘so many are still in Central just sitting, playing cards, going to parties. We have to think, how are they going to cope? How do we get them to join us?’ They shared that if they could offer advice to new arrivals of domestic workers to Hong Kong, it would be: ‘if you have a goal before leaving, you can plan, share with family, save and invest early. Here we are just getting older and older without a goal. Don’t wait until you are old to save, or until you need the money’. They shared stories of peers who returned with nothing and are now struggling to make ends meet without the monthly salary they were earning abroad.

Not all of these financialization initiatives are in the direct service of multinational corporations or global finance, even if the boundaries between these different approaches are sometimes challenging to ascertain. I encountered grassroots groups – led by domestic worker mentors themselves, for other domestic workers – which encourage investments into ‘social enterprises’ and co-operatives with social and environmental goals. In one group led by domestic workers, the leaders talked about how they collectively bought shares in a Philippine-based cacao farm co-operative for overseas migrants. They are now remotely managing a sustainable cacao farm with the support of peers and earning good interest, many of them articulating that they want to retain a sense of financial independence while investing in something meaningful for their home countries. This collective of domestic workers partners with social organizations in the Philippines, which receive funding from intergovernmental bodies such as the EU and the ILO to integrate financial education with modules on ‘return and reintegration’, tackling not only financial insecurities but also the emotional insecurities around future return and retirement.

In all of these cases, migrant women reflected on how they thought about their financial futures a little ‘too late’ in their migration journey. The shared narrative is of a life course shift from endless giving and cycles of debt, which characterized their younger migrant years, to being money-wise and forward-thinking as they matured. These new financialized aspirations among older migrants who participate in financial education courses emerge as ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault Reference Foucault, Martin, Gutman and Hutton1988) based on the neoliberal idea that one has to constantly work on oneself to find ‘success’, stability, and even wealth. This narrative further echoes the financialized notion of development that relies on the continued productivity of migrant returnees and retirees, even those who have long-worked in low-waged and precarious sectors, the commodification of the migrant body continuing well into later life. In many ways, financialization depoliticizes (Weiss Reference Weiss2015) by individualizing responsibility for financial security instead of it being a collective question around social protection. The investments that migrant women are expected to make with their comparatively low wages are furthermore risky, dependent on the volatility of financial markets (Nguyen Reference Nguyen2021). In one case, Cris (mentioned in Section 3) had invested money in a condominium unit in Manila, confident that she would be able to pay off the mortgage through continued work in Singapore. However, when she developed health issues, her employers terminated her contract prematurely. Being in her fifties, she was ‘too old’ to be hired for work abroad again, leaving her in significant debt.

Equally, it would be too simple to analyse these developments as a top-down neoliberal intrusion of financial institutions into the lives of the vulnerable. Such a reading would diminish the agency of women who find a renewed and aspirational sense of purpose with these projects (McKay Reference McKay, Bastia and Skeldon2020). The migrant women I met taking such courses feel a sense of freedom from the constraints of kinship expectations, while building friendships, communities, and taking on leadership roles. It must be said, nonetheless, that financial plans and aspirations rarely override existing relationships but instead coexist with women’s relations with peers, kin, and the state; the transformative dimension more prominent in the narratives than in practice. Whether or not their financial education leads to greater financial security later in life, they value spending their days off nourishing aspirations that they had put aside and finding ways to hold on to a sense of independence. Participating in such programmes further enables the women to position themselves beyond the racialized ‘domestic worker’ label that places them on the margins of the societies in which they live and work.

4.3 Alternative Plans

Despite the growing presence of financial education courses, it is important to note that not all domestic workers participate in them and cultivate these financialized aspirations. There are differently articulated visions and strategies for the future. One set of strategies, for instance, relates to more traditional economic activities: such as buying a simple plot of land, as mentioned in the case of Rose, a domestic worker in Singapore, who bought a small plot for rice cultivation in her home village. Her siblings manage it to supplement the household income. Others might participate in village-based savings groups, known as paluwagan in Filipino, borrowing from peers in these lending circles for more immediate needs (e.g., finishing the construction of one’s house) or for emergencies, rather than future-oriented or long-term plans. Jolie, for instance, sits on the same spot of pavement with her friends every Sunday in Central in Hong Kong and participates in these grassroots lending circles. In addition, she is an informal moneylender and earns commission from her compatriots who borrow money from her. Jolie recognizes the need for ready cash and tries to supplement her savings, saying ‘what’s the point if I get nothing in return for lending this money?’ But she often runs into trust issues and has seen conflicts in her friendship circle, including cases of friends disappearing because they cannot repay the loans with interest. It creates insecurity for Jolie, while her peers contend with high interest rates when borrowing from acquaintances. In another example, Siti, an Indonesian domestic worker in Singapore uttered ‘I have no patience for business! For me, even without money, going home is freedom, happiness, family, country’, her comments an optimistic contrast to the more anxiety-oriented narratives that I had heard more frequently. These examples demonstrate the diverse ways through which migrant women relate to finances and livelihoods – with some having more immediate rather than future-oriented goals, and others engaging with more traditional strategies (savings clubs, land purchase) rather than neoliberal financial education courses.

Reflecting the common practice of migrants building ‘remittance houses’ (Boccagni and Bivand Erdal Reference Boccagni and Bivand Erdal2020), Hema, from Sri Lanka, has sent remittances to build a house for her retirement in her hometown in Sri Lanka, which her sister takes care of in her absence. The house is enclosed by high white walls and a tall gate; it has a bright sky-lit living and dining room, a wet and dry kitchen, three bedrooms with the beds regularly made even when unused, an array of plants hanging in the garden, and an altar which she furnishes with statues of Buddhist and Hindu deities. Hema is single and envisions her house to be the centre of the village when she returns to cook for others, including the monks in the nearby temples. She recently opened a savings account and put her money in fixed deposits as she realizes that she needs money upon her return. She talks vaguely about how she could use her house as an international guest house one day, even if it is set back from the main road and quite a distance from tourist attractions. The idea remains a distant vision, and Hema does not take any courses on business or financial education. Hema often uttered that she wants to be remembered not for the money she takes to her grave when she dies but for the good she does in the world (through her faith and volunteer work described in Section 3), pointing to a different stance towards the future and retirement compared to the visions articulated in the financialized approach.

In Hong Kong, migrant activist groups present a different vision of the future, one that is based on state accountability and responsibility. One domestic worker activist that I met in Hong Kong, Che, who is now in her fifties, suggested that it would be difficult to expect her compatriots to participate in financial education courses when they have little savings. She argued instead for the state to honour all the financial contributions of migrant workers through their remittances and taxes paid and to ‘give us a [non-contributory] social pension without these excessive fees’. In this view, the responsibility for future security lies with the state rather than the individual migrant worker. Such voices, however, are limited given that not all domestic workers participate in advocacy movements, particularly not in Singapore, where neither migrants nor citizens hold the right to public protest.

4.4 Conclusion

This section has offered insight into the retirement and financial plans of late middle-aged domestic workers. For migrant domestic workers who have been working abroad for most of their adult lives, a large portion of their earnings were sent to their families through remittances, with many not having saved for their own ageing futures. The question of how they will sustain their livelihoods once they return is one that generates significant anxiety, with few having the privilege, or desire, to imagine ‘retirement’ as a time of inactivity. Limited state-based social protections for migrant workers when they return after decades of labour abroad and a hesitance to rely on kin in older-age have opened up novel spaces for the financialization of migrant women’s futures.

The kinds of financial education offered to migrant domestic workers vary with different actors – corporate, non-profit, state-affiliated, co-operative, and grassroots networks – promoting a range of approaches to the role of finance in their lives. This privatization of future security, on the one hand, plays on the structural inequalities that put migrant women in precarious positions and requires them to take responsibility for their own futures. This is in a context where migrant women have already contributed enormous financial sums to their home communities through remittances, as well as caring for the lives and futures of others for much of their adult lives with little pay or recognition. The shift towards privatized self-responsibility for the future moves away from seeing social protection as a political and collective imperative, eroding the state’s responsibility to care for the workers whose migratory journeys it has facilitated through temporary migration regimes. On the other hand, the migrant women I met and interviewed at these courses narrate their self-transformations from being naïve breadwinners to being informed and equipped with financial wisdom as a form of agency, finding new purpose at this later stage of their migration journeys. Despite this transformational narrative present in migrant women’s accounts, the financialization of the future for migrant women does not tell a linear story of towards freedom or independence. Individualized aspirations remain deeply and unevenly connected to migrants’ kinship and peer networks of interdependence, and entangled with state interests.

5.1 Experiences of Returned Migrant Domestic Workers

5.1.1 Lenasha: Contentment Upon Return

The road to Lenasha’s house is a few kilometres up a steep hill, which rises at one end of the busy and linear thoroughfare of a market town in central Sri Lanka. On my way to Lenasha’s house, I pass a bus station, a line of shops selling Singer sewing products, banks and Western Union agencies, gold pawn shops, and a few eateries before turning off to the right uphill past a white Buddha statue. Off the main road, a dirt path leads to four houses on a steep hill face, one of them being Lenasha’s (see Figure 4). Lenasha had returned to her hometown a few years prior to my visit, after a twenty-year stay abroad as a domestic worker. Her first stint was in Oman, where she spent three years, and subsequently Singapore, where she stayed for seventeen years with a number of different employers. During that time, her two children stayed in Sri Lanka and were raised by her husband, Mahesh, a school teacher in the school in the valley below her house. Mahesh used to take the two children to and from school on his motorbike, cooking their meals, and taking care of the household while his wife earned money abroad.

Figure 4

The exterior of Lenasha’s home in Sri Lanka. It was constructed with the remittances she sent from Singapore (photo by author).

Lenasha had gotten used to life abroad and had been apprehensive about returning to Sri Lanka. As she got older, it became harder to find a new employer when her contracts ended, and she returned reluctantly, ready to have stayed on longer. Her life in Singapore gave her a sense of independence. She spent her Sundays as a key figure in the Sri Lankan temple, supporting migrant women in the community with her years of experience while writing Sinhalese prose and poetry regularly for their monthly community newspaper. She loved playing ‘4D’, a local lottery in Singapore, always finding new number combinations for her four-digit picks every week. Through this, she made small wins over the years to add to her earnings. Though she spoke at length about her children and their accomplishments and how much she missed them when in Singapore, she saw her stay abroad as compatible with being a good, caring motherFootnote ²³ to them from a distance, while being able to maintain her independence. She worried that she would have nothing to do if she returned.

Her return home turned out much better than she had imagined. Lenasha, Mahesh, their grandchild, and Lenasha’s sister, Naya (herself a returnee from the Gulf), are at home on the day of my visit. Lenasha proudly gives me a tour of her home. The house has white walls and wooden-framed windows. Entering the living room, there is a blue sofa set, a white tiled floor, a glass coffee table, and several large framed photographs of Lenasha’s daughter’s wedding, her son’s and daughter’s graduations, alongside their framed educational certificates and achievements. All of these frames are material expressions of Lenasha’s decades of work abroad, which are proudly on display. Upstairs, there are the everyday objects and appliances the family acquired with her earnings – a big washing machine in the upstairs sitting room and all the toys she sent home to her children when they were growing up, which are now crammed into a cabinet. There are various photographs of Lenasha herself posing in front of different sites across Singapore, material expressions of this family’s transnational life over many years. Not everything with the building of her house went to plan while she was away. The staircases are still without railings, and she is disappointed that her kitchen is cramped, suggesting that her husband and relatives did not supervise the construction of the house with enough attention and care. Nevertheless, it is a comfortable home for the family, and Lenasha remarked that they were lucky to get the land at the time that they did. The balcony looks out over the green hills and the valley; the gentle breeze and sounds of nature and chants from the temple make it feel peaceful.

Lenasha’s children completed college and are now salaried bank employees. They live close to home, and their daughter married a wealthy owner of a tea estate. They demonstrate what a ‘successful’ migration project for intergenerational social mobility might look like and are happy to finally have Lenasha home. Lenasha reflects on her daily routines with her sister Naya, waking up early in the morning to prepare packed lunches for their children before they leave for work, and then focusing on taking care of her grandson. ‘I am very happy’, Lenasha said, with a glow on her face. The fact that she is ‘all day busy’ gives her a sense of purpose. Financially, Lenasha and her husband get by with the pension that her husband receives from his teaching career and from the support of her adult children who earn good salaries in the bank. In addition to caring for her family, Lenasha prepares food for the monks in the nearby temple as part of her spiritual practice and service, and occasionally helps Naya with the boarding house for female students, which Naya runs on the side. When possible, she travels within Sri Lanka and to neighbouring countries like India on pilgrimages to Buddhist sites, either on her own or with Mahesh, echoing Michele Gamburd’s (Reference Gamburd2020) observations on the importance of religion for older people in Sri Lanka. Lenasha’s story demonstrates how lifelong remittances – for her children’s education and the construction of her house – can generate familial social mobility, as well as a comfortable and fulfilling older-age, despite Lenasha’s apprehension about her own return. This is a story that reflects the more common narrative of migration as a practice for improving one’s family’s well-being and socio-economic status, and how the future may turn out better than one might have anticipated before returning.

5.2 Conclusion

Return migration later in life after years abroad working under temporary migration regimes poses a social challenge for economies and communities that have relied on migrant remittances over many years. There has been little preparedness among the states governing mass contract labour migration for the financial and emotional challenges that an ageing generation of migrant workers would face. While more ‘return and reintegration’ programmes have emerged over the past decade, there is little attention to the age-related challenges of returning later in life, and the entrepreneurial slant that most of these programmes adopt places the onus on migrants to secure their livelihoods. There is a further implicit expectation that migrants’ work abroad and their remittances over the years will lead to linear progress for their families and communities, and that these families will look after the needs of the ageing return migrant.

While the previous sections looked at how older migrant women anticipate their futures in retirement and old-age, this section has considered the mixed experiences of those who returned as insight into whether the scenarios that domestic workers anticipate about their futures play out. In many cases, there are material markers of ‘success’ and of social mobility through positive stories of intergenerational transformation through education, housing, and employment. Such stories fit the ‘textbook’ end-goal of migration-for-development narratives, and this is seen most clearly in Lenasha’s story of return to her husband and children. Her remittances supported the construction of the family home, her children’s education, and their secure employment; they in turn are now supporting Lenasha upon her return. Yet the stories of Kumari, Priya, and Lena (and her friend Jolene) tell a more ambivalent story, which reflect the fears domestic workers hold about their futures: of tensions with kin after many years apart, of isolation and longing for a sense of purpose which they have lost, and of struggles to secure and sustain one’s livelihood or healthcare expenses in times of illness. These narratives attest to the continuation of forms of socio-economic precarity and the unreliability (and indeed undesirability) of relying on children who may not themselves have secure employment or whose earnings are now prioritized to support the next generation. These experiences resonate with discussions on how class positionalities among migrants are dynamic and constantly shifting (see e.g., Coe and Pauli Reference Coe and Pauli2020) and that long-term migration does not guarantee a linear transition into a secure middle-class life.

Temporary migration regimes, moreover, create emotional dissonances among migrants upon return. The affective dimensions and emotional loose-ends of lives post-migration are not always captured in discussions of migrant remittances and social mobility. Being with kin once again is a real joy for some returnees after many years of geographical separation. But such reunions do not come without significant adjustments and renegotiations of (in)dependence as there is a recognition that their original ‘homes’ and relationships have changed. In the later stages of their lives, return migrants have to reconcile the moral, affective, and economic entanglements and differences between their migrant and non-migrant lives (Chan Reference Chan2018; Killias Reference Killias2017; Sampaio Reference Sampaio2025), between home ‘here’ and home ‘there’, between autonomy and dependence, and between creative experimentation and fitting normative expectations. Friendships, solidarities, and kinship bonds abroad tend to disperse and fade away over time once migrant women return to the precarious livelihoods they left behind, even if the women themselves are transformed by these encounters and experiences abroad. In this way, the ruptures between their lives abroad and their lives upon return are bridged through these self-transformations and transnational imaginaries.

As more migrant workers return in older-age, further research is still needed into their ageing experiences and how their relationships change over time, alongside newer survey data on how returned migrants are faring socially and economically. This can complement ethnographic narratives, which reveal the complex emotions that migrants hold when they return after long-term migration.

6.1 The COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Impact

Continuing the theme of health, it is worth noting that the COVID-19 pandemic occurred precisely in the time period when I carried out my research with older migrant domestic workers. In many ways, the disruptions that domestic workers faced during the pandemic foreshadowed the ruptures to their transnational lives that many will experience upon retirement. The pandemic upended familiar routines and created uncertainties about the future. It accentuated domestic workers’ immobilities, as they were barred from leaving their employers’ homes and unable to travel to visit kin in countries of origin. Migrant domestic workers further lost their weekly day off, a time for connecting with others beyond the household and sending remittances to their families. Smartphones then became even more of a lifeline (as they were already crucial to staying connected to their families). Some of the Sunday activities in which domestic workers participated moved online. The older domestic workers that I knew started to attend skills and financial education courses on their phones during their lunch breaks, in the evenings, and on Sundays. In some cases, they borrowed laptops from their employers to be able to participate. Some used the time to make vlogs about the steps they were taking to prepare for the future, and others joined online poetry readings. It is worth noting that not all domestic workers had the time, space, or energy to participate in online courses during the pandemic, given their higher workloads in the household with their employers working or studying from home during the lockdowns. Many still missed the sensorial, embodied nature of being with others on Sundays, praying in a Church, sitting together to eat and chat, being in a space outside of their employment.

In some cases, the COVID-19 pandemic led to contract terminations when employers of domestic workers decided to relocate. For older domestic workers, it was difficult to find new employers at that stage, and returning to their countries of origin to retire would have been the only option, often earlier than they would have wanted to (as the story of Lena, in Section 5, elaborates). When I went to meet some of my key interlocutors in the ‘post-pandemic’ phase, I often brought up the preceding years and asked how they dealt with it. Most responded briefly, saying it was a terrible time which left them feeling very isolated, but quickly moved onto talking about their present and future concerns. It was a past they wanted to forget, focusing instead on more pressing concerns in their lives. This note on the pandemic serves as a reminder of this specific period in history during which this research took place, and offers a broader reflection on the multiple, unexpected crises that can intervene into the lives of those whose caring labour was made visibly ‘essential’ yet whose precarious circumstances made it difficult to withstand. In some ways, the pandemic accentuated already-existing immobilities – domestic workers’ permits limit their local and transnational mobilities – rather than introducing restrictions that were completely new. What was new, during and after the pandemic, was a stronger articulation of mental health and well-being for and among migrant domestic workers, with both state-produced brochures on mental health, as well as a greater interest in yoga, exercise, and meditation classes, some of which were incorporated into the ‘return and reintegration’ modules that migrant women enrolled in.

6.2 Future Research Agendas

There is still further research to be done on ageing migrant workers in different comparative contexts. While this Element has highlighted the gendered experiences of older migrant women in the domestic and care work sectors, a similar study on the ageing futures and experiences of migrant men is much needed. Men who go abroad to work under contract labour migration regimes in construction work and seafaring, for example, have to similarly contend with sustaining their livelihoods at the end of their working lives abroad. In fact, men may retire even earlier from manual labour when their bodies age, with fewer options to claim ‘indispensability’ in the ways that domestic workers can based on their caring responsibilities and affective bonds with their employers. There is little research on how returning men face questions relating to old-aged care, kin relations, livelihoods, social protection, and their gendered identities in later life.

This study has focussed on migrant women from the Philippines, Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka. As domestic workers employed on temporary migration contracts, these women share a similar structural position in the landscape of migrant labour in Singapore and Hong Kong and thus confront similar challenges with regard to ageing, retirement, and return. While this Element offers some observations on how domestic workers of different nationalities relate differently to their ageing futures, further research might explore, in greater depth, the cultural specificities around ageing, retirement, and care in transnational contexts. Such research could furthermore usefully examine the micro-politics within particular national or ethnic groupings of migrants and their relations to local populations. Take, for instance, the relationship between low-waged domestic workers from Tamil Nadu and their wealthier Indian employers, and how caste, class, regional, and linguistic commonalities or differences shape domestic workers’ experiences and futures.

There is further comparative research to be done across different temporary migration regimes. This includes further research on ageing migrants within Asia and the Gulf states, as well as in other regional contexts given that temporary migration visas are becoming increasingly prevalent in contemporary migration management and policy-making in countries such as Australia, Canada, the UK, and Germany, to name just a few (see e.g., Pietsch Reference Pietsch2022; Triandafyllidou Reference Triandafyllidou2022; Withers and Hill Reference Withers and Hill2023). In all such cases, an understanding of the long-term implications of these legal categories on migrant experiences across the life course (including questions of care and social protection when they age and retire) is necessary and will provide a more complete picture of the challenges facing older migrants and their families within different socio-political and legal frameworks.

Finally, there is a need for further research into the intergenerational impacts of domestic workers’ long-term migration projects and how their journeys shape the work and migration aspirations of the next generation (Yeoh et al. Reference Yeoh, Lam, Somaiah and Acedera2023). It remains to be seen whether the same cycles of precarity and of transnational care (Liebelt Reference Liebelt2011a) continue from one generation to the next or whether the next generation finds greater security and agency in making decisions about work and care that do not rely exclusively on going abroad under precarious and temporary migration schemes. Such research will shift the focus beyond domestic workers’ own life courses to examining the transhistorical impacts of temporary migration on multiple generations.

6.3 Policy Implications

This Element raises important questions for policy at the intersection of ageing and migration. A transnational perspective demonstrates the limits of static nation- or place-based framings of ageing. Meanwhile, the lens of ageing enables consideration of the passage of time in migration journeys, reiterating that migration trajectories and aspirations are not fixed or linear and that they change over time. While temporary migration regimes presume short-term and transient stays, serial and long-term migration patterns within temporary migration regimes are more common than typically acknowledged. Migrants, moreover, are not exclusively young. A life course approach sheds light on how migrant women, as they grow older abroad, build relationships, communities, and friendships and contribute in myriad ways to the societies in which they have lived and worked over many years. These points shed light on some key policy-oriented observations:

1. (1) There are significant inequalities in ageing. Age intersects with other socially and historically constituted categories of difference, such as race, class, and gender. People who experience discrimination and exclusion over the course of life may find that these experiences can limit their access to care, housing, social protections, and secure livelihoods in the later stages of life. The politics of migration – what kinds of rights people hold when crossing borders – matter significantly in shaping networks and forms of support for later life. Groups with more privilege, who are able to move freely across borders, have the option to purchase particular lifestyles in retirement, while others struggle to find a decent quality of life. Policies around ageing, health, and well-being might be more inclusive of migrants, regardless of their residency or visa status.

2. (2) Care work is rarely regarded as work and therefore not protected under the same labour legislation as other forms of work. Recognition of the care work that migrant domestic workers do – in both their countries of origin, and the societies in which they work – can go a long way in providing better social protections for domestic workers’ own futures. This includes incorporating migrant domestic workers into pension schemes.

3. (3) Nation-state-based social policies relating to care, health, and social security do not always correspond with the realities of transnational living. A reimagination of social policies for old-age and care with a transnational lens can better support the needs of families and communities whose lives are spread across multiple places. Current forms of transnational social protection often include a hybrid of different forms of support (state, kin-based, faith-based, humanitarian) (Levitt et al. Reference Levitt, Dobbs, Sun and Paul2023), which are not always reliable. Given how much states organize and profit from mass temporary labour migration, their provision of further safety nets could go a long way to provide a secure foundation for migrant women’s retirement plans, their livelihoods, and their health and care needs in old-age.

4. (4) The notion of ‘ageing in place’,Footnote ²⁴ which has gained currency over the past decade in ageing policy circles, tends to overlook cases where people age in challenging environments (Buffel and Phillipson Reference Buffel and Phillipson2023) and where people age across multiple places and ‘in networks’ (Gao et al. Reference Gao, Ho, Chua and Feng2024; Ho et al. Reference Ho, Chua and Feng2024), as a result of transnational living. Greater attention to the emotional dimensions of ageing across multiple places would better support the well-being of older migrant domestic workers and others in similar situations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a further opportunity to policy-makers to rethink temporary migration schemes in ways to make them more resilient, sustainable, and equitable to ‘shocks’, as Brenda Yeoh (Reference Yeoh2022) has argued. Among the proposals Yeoh puts forward, which the findings of this research support, are (i) to offer visas and contracts of longer duration alongside pathways towards residency, (ii) to build stronger safety nets for migrants, and (iii) to move beyond a purely economic logic in temporary migration models to one that considers all dimensions of well-being – social, health, community, and familial.

As societies increasingly rely on domestic workers to care for their ageing populations, this study makes visible how carers themselves grapple with social, economic, and existential questions around their own well-being in later life. Supporting the needs, aspirations, and futures of those who labour to ensure the well-being of others would acknowledge the central role that care plays in sustaining households and economies, and the meaningful relationships and opportunities that emerge through this still-undervalued labour in Asia, and globally.