International migration is expanding rapidly, and the experience of aging is changing with it. The Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells describes our society as dominated by a ‘space of flows ’ arising from the rapid interchange of information and ideas through new information systems; but the movement of people throughout what Castells calls ‘the space of places ’ is an equally striking characteristic of life in modern societies (Castells 1996, 409-15). In 1960, an estimated 77 million people emigrated; by 2010, the number of migrants reached 214 million (OECD 2012b, 16). Overwhelmingly, these are people of working age; and nearly two thirds live in what the United Nations (UN) defines as the developed nations (UN 2010). Migration and population aging are tightly bound together, with both developments having their origins in deeper processes of social and economic change, including such well-known features of modernity as economic globalisation, increasing material aspirations, the erosion of tradition and the transformation of family structures. From a policy perspective, labour migration represents an important way of replacing aging retirees as they leave the workforce, as well as ensuring a stead supply of fresh labour more generally. The right of free movement of labour was one of the founding objectives of the European Union, though at no stage has labour migration within the EU matched