Midlife Digital Care Work of the Highly Skilled Migrants

Abstract

Digital technologies now shape nearly every stage of high‐skilled migration: recruitment, relocation, professional networking, transnational work, and everyday relationship maintenance. Yet digitalisation in relation to migration during midlife remains underexplored. In this article, we develop the concept of midlife digital care work to explain the capability‐based, relationship‐sustaining labour through which highly skilled migrants maintain intimate, intergenerational, and professional ties across borders. Drawing on 23 semi‐structured interviews with Latvian middle‐aged professionals living transnationally, we show that digital care work is especially intensive in marriage and partnership, while also extending to children, parents, friendships, and professional communities. We argue that digital infrastructures form the enabling conditions of such care, while purposeful midlife mobility provides its life‐course context. Interlocutors’ accounts demonstrate the limits of mediated connection: Digital communication cannot replace embodied co‐presence, touch, shared material space, and being together. By foregrounding midlife digital care work, the article extends scholarship on midlife mobilities and digital migration studies by showing how migrants evaluate digital connections as part of their capability sets and as integral to crafting meaningful, relationally sustainable lives across borders.