Who pays attention to older immigrants?
Photo by Jim Wilson at the NYT
Who looks after elder immigrants? How do they meet people, get out of the house, make a new life? Is anyone studying their experiences? An article in the New York Times yesterday looked at older immigrants from India and Afghanistan mostly, in Fremont, California. According to the article, one in three seniors is foreign-born in California, and nationwide, about 11% of recently arrived immigrants are over age 65. To my knowledge, no researchers in immigration studies are looking at this population. Traditionally immigration studies has focused on adult workers, and recently there’s been a lot of emphasis on studying the experiences of the second generation. But perhaps I’ll focus my next project (post graduate school!) on studying the integration experiences and challenges of older immigrants. Perhaps I could convince people who fund research on the elderly (which is a growing population, and area of research) to fund a study of older immigrants, and/or one of my graduate students could study their experiences.