Migration Decision-Making and the Changing Intergenerational Care Relations in Asia

International migration has become a ubiquitous phenomenon. Across Asia, there has been an increasing concern that social changes brought about by migration may lead to a weakening of the intergenerational contract, thus hampering the extent to which ageing parents can receive old-age care and support from their adult children. Migration decision-making within the intergenerational care context thus becomes an important social and research topic. In migration scholarship, few have scrutinized how older and younger generations negotiate migration decisions and make intergenerational care plans in the pre-migration context. Using Hong Kong as a case, this paper addresses this lacuna by examining the migration decision-making process between ageing parents and adult children. A mix of qualitative in-depth interviews and visual care mapping are used to generate multi-dimensional data for this purpose. Specifically, this paper illuminates whether and how ageing parents and intergenerational care considerations are involved in the migration decision-making process. Questions as to whether migration is a personal or family decision, whether there are discrepancies between the views of the generations, and how they manage such discrepancies during the migration decision-making process will also be discussed. The findings of this paper contribute to the ongoing intellectual debate about the changing intergenerational contract and shed light on the dynamic relationship between migration and intergenerational care. They also help reveal whether ageing parents are embracing or resisting the new trend of independent ageing that has emerged in broader Asia in recent years.