Older Migrants on Civic Engagement

Scholars on civic engagement have long debated if we should use broad or narrow conceptualizations of this notion. Even though scholarship on migrants' civic engagement takes for granted that there is something distinctively unique about them that merits studying them separately, no research has addressed how migrants themselves make sense of this notion. Instead, research on migrants’ civic engagement has primarily focused on their experiences with regards to a limited number of civic activities, the measurement of their engagement in these activities, and the factors that influence their participation. Thus, we do not know whether migrants rely on broad or narrow conceptualizations of civic engagement when they explain how they make sense of this notion, which is why we use 60 qualitative interviews with older migrants in Belgium, Finland, Spain, and Sweden (+ 60 socio-demographic and civic participation questionnaires) to address this knowledge gap. The analysis shows that although some of the interviewed migrants could not formulate how they make sense of this notion, most of their conceptualizations relied on a combination of allusions to a limited number of civic activities and to what these activities accomplish. It is also noted that the two civic activities that were most often mentioned were associational activities and helping behaviors (as opposed to formal volunteering and political participation which are the activities that have been researched the most when focusing on older migrants). By exposing the ways in which some older migrants make sense of this notion, this paper questions some of the taken-for-granted assumptions underlying research on migrants’ civic engagement.