The Caregiving Experiences of Immigrant Families Supporting a Member with Disabilities: A Scoping Review

Background: While the intersection of migration and disability has received growing scholarly attention, there remains a striking gap in the literature concerning migrant families with caregiving responsibilities, particularly those caring for a member with disabilities. Little is known about how these families or individuals navigate the complex demands of caregiving while simultaneously managing the social, legal, economic, and health-related challenges inherent in migration processes. For a topic with a limited and fragmented evidence base such as this, a scoping review is a favourable methodology for mapping and describing existing information across diverse sources, study designs, and methodologies.

Methods: A rapid scoping review of existing literature on caregiving responsibilities and experiences of caregivers of migrants with disabilities, or closely related topics, was conducted with a focus on Global North countries—specifically Western Europe, Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand. Only English‑language articles published between 2005 and 2025 were included. The protocol followed the established scoping review stages: identifying the research question; identifying relevant studies; study selection; charting the data; and collating, summarising, and reporting the results. The guiding research question was: “What is known about the caregiving experiences of migrant families in the context of disability?”

We conducted comprehensive searches for studies across multiple databases, including Scopus, Web of Science, Wiley Online Library, Sociological Abstracts, Social Science Abstracts, Google Scholar, PsycINFO, Academic Search Premier, CINAHL, E‑journals, Education Source Ultimate, Sociology Source Ultimate, and Medline. Five researchers independently screened literature using Rayyan software; resolving any conflicts through consensus meetings. We included studies focusing on migrants/refugees/asylum seekers with disabilities, families of migrants/refugees/asylum seekers with disabled member and caring responsibilities of children with disabilities in migration settings. We included 19 studies out of 250 identified articles. Data were extracted and analyzed using thematic analysis.

Results: The studies reported data majorly from Australia, the UK, Germany, Italy, Canada, USA and Norway. Across the studies, caregiving responsibilities were described as overwhelming and characterised by persistent struggles in meeting psychosocial needs such as health, educational, and assistive‑technology needs. These challenges existed from the onset of migration, continued throughout resettlement, and remained a permanent aspect of family life. Secondly, the intensity of caregiving—particularly parenting a child with disabilities—was consistently associated with significant psychological and mental health strain for caregivers. Another key finding is the limited understanding of the policies and procedures required to access available assistance for disabled family members.

Finally, despite the already limited number of studies on this topic, the existing work centers almost entirely on migrant children with disabilities, as no studies focus on adult migrants with disabilities. This absence reflects policy patterns in many Western countries, where immigration regulations often restrict the entry of disabled migrants or families with a disabled member. Overall, the findings indicate that disability-related caregiving compounds the challenges of migration, highlight the persistent erosion of disability rights in migration contexts, and reveals a critical need for targeted social interventions for migrants with disabilities. These gaps also point to the urgent need for more empirical research in this area.