“I Don’t Want to be a Burden”: Autonomy and Dignity in Later-Life Migration

• In Event: From Youth to Elders: The Social Worlds of Immigrants Across the Lifespan

Abstract

Older migrants are often portrayed as economically dependent or primarily engaged in caregiving within multigenerational households. Far less attention has been paid to how they understand and negotiate autonomy in later life. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork at a library ESL program serving Chinese migrants aged 55 and above in Los Angeles, this article examines how older migrants resist being positioned as dependent burdens and instead pursue autonomy and dignity. I argue that participants construct autonomy as both a practical and moral project. Through language learning, navigation of public institutions, independent living arrangements, and post-retirement work, they cultivate forms of self-reliance that extend beyond familial care obligations. Language learning, in particular, enables mobility, sustains self-respect, and preserves continuity between pre- and post-migration identities. By analyzing aging and migration as interactive processes, this study shows how later-life migration reshapes the meaning of aging and how aging, in turn, reconfigures migrants’ identities and sense of belonging.

Author

• Yiran Yu, UCLA