Navigating Eldercare in North Carolina: Healthcare Decision-Making Among Chinese Immigrants for Aging Parents

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 16. Immigration and health / health care

Abstract

Population aging and global mobility, combined with the retrenchment of welfare states, have intensified the reliance on families for eldercare across national borders. To better understand healthcare-seeking processes of immigrants for their elder parents, this study examines how immigrant adults navigate eldercare infrastructures within and across the state social protection contexts, as well as how intergenerational obligations are invoked, contested, and negotiated among family members over time. Using Chinese immigrants in North Carolina, a new immigrant destination with limited co-ethnic aging infrastructure, as a case and drawing on 30 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, I argue that healthcare seeking for elderly parents is a relational and institutional process shaped by family negotiations, immigration status, socioeconomic position, life-course trajectory, and local contexts of reception. By centering institutional navigation within transnational families, this study bridges transnational eldercare scholarship and public health studies on aging immigrants and advances an understanding of family obligations grounded in contingent access to care.

Author

• Yuxin Zhao, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill