The best welfare deal: retirement migrants as welfare maximizers

Abstract

Retirement migration within Europe has increased enormously since the 1990s. It now involves millions of elderly Europeans moving from Central/Northern Europe (UK, Germany, Scandinavia) to Mediterranean countries (Malta, Portugal, Spain) in search of a better quality of life. Most previous research departs from an ethnographic perspective to look at the personal experiences and motivations of retirement migrants. In this paper, we adopt a macro-level perspective to address the use that retirement migrants make of the European framework of social rights. We aim to understand (a) to what extent do retirement migrants living in Spain ask for help from the local Social Services when they enter into dependency? (b) Do retirement migrants engage in strategies to maximize their welfare rights? To answer these questions, we carried out qualitative phone interviews with the coordinators of Social Services that cover 80 (out of 119) of the Spanish municipalities with larger numbers of retirement migrants (more than 30% of elderly residents are foreigners).