Transnational Ageing and the ‘Zero Generation’: The Role of Moroccan Migrants’ Parents in Care Circulation

This article emphasizes the impacts of international migration on ageing processes and norms within transnational families, and, specifically, analyses the roles of the zero generation, defined as the parents of first-generation migrants (Nedelcu 2009), both as non-migrant counterparts to their children abroad and as ageing migrants themselves. Transnational caregiving research has demonstrated that for many migrants and their families care arrangements must be negotiated across national borders, yet the agency of transnational older adults has been largely neglected. Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted from 2011 to 2013 in Liège, Belgium and Oujda, Morocco, the present article examines the circulation of care between Moroccan adult migrants and their ageing ascendants. This article exposes the duality of migrants’ ascendants as care givers and recipients, asserting firstly, that receiving care is not synonymous with passivity, and that, secondly, migrants’ ascendants are also the initiators of transnational practices. In both roles, this article underlines mobility as a strategy used by migrants’ parents to maintain family solidarity across national borders, but that this care mobility is limited by macro-level migration policies, here exemplified by the Belgian migration regime.