Older migrants' civic participation: A topic in need of attention

Abstract

The number of international migrants around the world has steadily increased, as has the number of people that belong to the older segments of our populations. Due to these demographic transformations, topics that have yet to receive scholarly attention have begun to receive the attention of research communities. This article aims to expand the social gerontological agenda on civic participation in old age by arguing that migratory life courses offer new angles of investigation. By bringing attention to older migrants' civic participation, this article argues also for the expansion of the imagination of migration scholars who have yet to regard civic participation as an angle of investigation worthy of attention when it comes to this population. Thus, by proposing some of the research questions that could be posed if older migrants' civic participation was to be a part of the research agenda of social gerontologists and migration scholars alike, this article proposes that the ways in which these older people chose to engage civically is one of the ways through which we could bring explicit attention to the contributions that they make to their so called ‘host’ societies.