They called themselves "economic refugees"
Not the migrants you'd expect.
They called themselves “economic refugees.”
Not the migrants you’d expect. These were Americans and Canadians in their 60s. Former consultants, business owners, blue-collar workers. People who’d done everything right. Saved what they could. Assumed retirement would look like their parents’ retirement.
Then 2008 happened.
And suddenly, a city most of them had never heard of—Cuenca, Ecuador—became the answer to a question they never wanted to ask: Where can I afford to grow old?
Matthew Hayes, a sociologist at St. Thomas University, spent three years interviewing 69 North American migrants in Cuenca. His findings, published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, reveal something the retirement industry doesn’t advertise.
This isn’t lifestyle migration. It’s survival strategy.
Here’s what he found.
In 47 of 69 interviews, cost of living was the primary reason for relocation. Not the weather. Not cultural curiosity. Not adventure. Money. Or more precisely, the lack of it.
One man lost 80% of his consulting business during the crash. He and his wife moved to Ecuador within a year. Another couple sold their house during the market collapse, spent over a year unemployed, watched their savings evaporate. As the wife put it, they faced a choice between living “much more frugally” or what she called “genteel poverty.”
Her husband finished the thought: “That just wasn’t attractive.”
So they left.
Forbes Magazine gave this strategy a name back in 2004. Rich Karlgaard called it “geographic arbitrage”—the practice of earning money in high-cost locations and spending it in low-cost ones. Timothy Ferriss popularized a version of this in his 2007 bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek, framing it as “lifestyle design” for digital entrepreneurs.
But the retirees in Cuenca aren’t building location-independent businesses. They’re cashing out.
Pension accumulated in San Francisco. Spent in the Andes.
Social Security check from Washington. Rent paid in Ecuador.
The math works because of structural inequality. As Aihwa Ong observed in her research on transnational mobility, this kind of “flexible citizenship” encourages people to respond “fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions.” Hayes argues that geographic arbitrage is the retirement-age version of this logic. Privileges gained at “high latitudes” of the global economy get exchanged at higher rates of return in the developing world.
One participant described it plainly: “We could afford a housecleaner twice a week. We can afford someone that picks up and does the laundry and folds the laundry. We can afford a gardener... If we wanted to, we could eat out all the time.”
He called himself an “economic refugee.”
His pension couldn’t buy a “comfortable middle class retirement” back home.
The European literature on lifestyle migration tells a different story. Scholars like Benson and O’Reilly have documented British retirees moving to rural France or the Spanish coast. Those migrations tend to follow years of vacationing. They’re driven by appreciation of local culture, sunny climates, the search for authenticity.
The North Americans in Cuenca had often never been to Ecuador before. Many had never been to South America at all.
They found Cuenca the same way most found it: through a publication called International Living.
Of the 67 interviews where Hayes asked how participants first heard about the city, 37 mentioned the magazine directly. Another ten cited internet research that almost certainly led to content produced by or influenced by the publication.
International Living is owned by Agora Inc., a publishing house founded in 1978 by Bill Bonner. The company’s philosophy, according to its website, celebrates “the virtue of thinking independently and taking responsibility for your own life.” It publishes libertarian pamphlets, financial newsletters, and produced the documentary I.O.U.S.A., which became a rallying point for Tea Party Republicans advocating cuts to social security.
The message is consistent: your retirement is your problem. And here’s a consumer solution.
As Hayes observes, this framing has consequences. It transforms collective challenges—the erosion of pension security, rising healthcare costs, wage stagnation—into individual puzzles with private answers. Every crisis becomes an opportunity. Not for policy change. For relocation.
One migrant captured the trade-off: “Now, understand, to make the decision we made to come here, we gave up a lot, okay? But we gained a lot. We gained a lot over what we would have had.”
The key phrase is “over what we would have had.”
Not over what they’d expected. Not over what they’d planned for. Over what remained possible.
Some migrants frame this as adventure. Many genuinely find meaning in their new lives. But Hayes notes that rationalisations for transnational relocation aren’t merely post-hoc justifications. They connect what C. Wright Mills called “private troubles” to “public issues.”
The private trouble: insufficient retirement savings.
The public issue: the systematic dismantling of retirement security in North America.
Scholars like Duménil and Lévy have documented how productive investment and offshoring eroded the social benefits workers obtained from post-war settlements. Harvey traced the “brief history of neoliberalism” that restructured expectations about what societies owe their aging populations. The migrants in Cuenca are living the consequences.
As one woman told Hayes, “I would prefer to move back to San Francisco, but I can’t afford it.”
Another, a 69-year-old consultant whose work was “drying up,” put it starkly: “No one wants to bleed to death.”
The flow is accelerating. International Organization for Migration data shows that nearly half of American citizens living in Ecuador as of 2010 had arrived since 2006. In 2009-2010 alone, 4,000 showed up. Long-time residents in Cuenca remember when “Gringo Night” meant eight people at a table. By 2013, estimates put the North American population between 3,500 and 5,000.
The baby boomer generation has reached retirement age. And they’re arriving in Latin America with expectations shaped by publications promising they can “live comfortably on less than $700 a month” or “retire like royalty” on $2,500.
Hayes points out what these publications rarely mention: the impact on receiving communities.
When the local population appears in International Living, it’s usually as a source of cheap domestic labor. The gentrification effects—rising rents, transformed commercial districts, displaced locals—go unexamined. As previous research by Janoschka and others has documented, lifestyle migrants often see their impact in benign or beneficial terms. They remain unaware of how their presence restructures local economies.
The irony is structural. North Americans displaced by financial insecurity become, in their new home, the gentrifiers. Their spending power distorts local real estate markets. Their presence transforms the urban landscape. Some Cuencanos benefit. Others get priced out—and potentially begin their own migration, northward, toward higher-earning areas.
As Hayes notes, “the unequal distribution of the world’s resources continues to provide opportunities for higher latitudes to capture and colonise lower latitudes of the global division of labour, displacing people who have lived and worked there all their lives.”
The geographic arbitrageurs didn’t intend this.
But intention is beside the point.
What matters is the system that made this the rational choice. The system that transformed retirement from a collective guarantee into an individual gamble. The system that told a generation: you’re on your own.
They found their answer in the Andes. A city 8,300 feet above sea level, with more rainy days than sunshine, that somehow became one of the top retirement destinations in the world.
Not because of the weather.
Because of the math.
This post draws on research published by Matthew Hayes in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2014), alongside cited works from Karlgaard (2004, 2006), Ferriss (2007), Ong (1999, 2006), Benson and O’Reilly (2009), Mills (1959), Duménil and Lévy (2011), Harvey (2005), Janoschka (2009, 2011), and others.