Examining which actors determine undocumented migrants’ access to healthcare on the ground, this volume looks at what happens in the daily interactions between administrative personnel, healthcare professionals and migrant patients in healthcare institutions across Europe. Borders across Healthcare explores contemporary moral economies of the healthcare-migration nexus. The volume documents the many ways in which borders come to disrupt healthcare settings and illuminates how judgements of a health-related deservingness become increasingly important, producing hierarchies that undermine a universal right to healthcare.
In Fevered Measures, John Mckiernan-González examines public health campaigns along the Texas-Mexico border between 1848 and 1942 and reveals the changing medical and political frameworks U.S. health authorities used when facing the threat of epidemic disease. The medical borders created by these officials changed with each contagion and sometimes varied from the existing national borders. Federal officers sought to distinguish Mexican citizens from U.S. citizens, a process troubled by the deeply interconnected nature of border communities. Mckiernan-González uncovers forgotten or ignored cases in which Mexicans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and other groups were subject to—and sometimes agents of—quarantines, inspections, detentions, and forced-treatment regimens. These cases illustrate the ways that medical encounters shaped border identities before and after the Mexican Revolution. Mckiernan-González also maintains that the threat of disease provided a venue to destabilize identity at the border, enacted processes of racialization, and re-legitimized the power of U.S. policymakers. He demonstrates how this complex history continues to shape and frame contemporary perceptions of the Latino body today.
Here is the first comprehensive cross-disciplinary work to examine the current health situation of our immigrants, successfully integrating the vast literature of diverse fields -- epidemiology, health services research, anthropology, law, medicine, social work, health promotion, and bioethics -- to explore the richness and diversity of the immigrant population from a culturally-sensitive perspective. This unequalled resource examines methodological issues, issues in clinical care and research, health and disease in specific immigrant populations, patterns of specific diseases in immigrant groups in the US, and conclusive insight towards the future. Complete with 73 illustrations, this singular book is the blueprint for where we must go in the future.
How does the need to obtain and deliver health services engender particular (im)mobility forms? And how is mobility experienced and imagined when it is required for healthcare access or delivery? Guided by these questions, Healthcare in Motion explores the dynamic interrelationship between mobility and healthcare, drawing on case studies from across the world and shedding light on the day-to-day practices of patients and professionals.
This book explores the pressing issues of border control and infectious disease from the nineteenth to present day. The book places world health in world history, microbes and their management in globalization, and disease in the history of international relations, bringing together leading scholars on the history and politics of global health.
We build border walls to keep danger out. But do we understand the danger posed by walls themselves? East Germans were the first to give the crisis a name: Mauerkrankheit, or “wall disease.” The afflicted—everyday citizens living on both sides of the Berlin wall—displayed some combination of depression, anxiety, excitability, suicidal ideation, and paranoia. The Berlin Wall is no more, but today there are at least seventy policed borders like it. What are they doing to our minds? Jessica Wapner investigates, following a trail of psychological harm around the world. In Brownsville, Texas, the hotly contested US-Mexico border wall instills more feelings of fear than of safety. And in eastern Europe, a Georgian grandfather pines for his homeland—cut off from his daughters, his baker, and his bank by the arbitrary path of a razor-wire fence built in 2013. Even in borderlands riven by conflict, the same walls that once offered relief become enduring reminders of trauma and helplessness. Our brains, Wapner writes, devote “border cells” to where we can and cannot go safely—so, a wall that goes up in our town also goes up in our minds. Weaving together interviews with those living up against walls and expert testimonies from geographers, scientists, psychologists, and other specialists, she explores the growing epidemic of wall disease—and illuminates how neither those “outside” nor “inside” are immune.
There is increasing interest in the scientific literature on immigrant health and its impact on disease transmission, disease prevention, health promotion, well-being on an individual and population level, health policy, and the cost of managing all these issues on an individual, institutional, national, and global level. The need for accurate and up-to-date information is particularly acute due to the increasing numbers of immigrants and refugees worldwide as the result of natural disasters, political turmoil, the growing numbers of immigrants to magnet countries, and the increasing costs of associated health care that are being felt by governments around the world. Format and Scope: The first portion of the encyclopedia contains chapters that are approximately 25 to 40 manuscript pages in length. Each overview chapter includes a list of references and suggested readings for cross referencing within the encyclopedia. The opening chapters are: Immigration in the Global Context, Immigration Processes and Health in the U.S.: A Brief History, Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Culture-Specific Diagnoses, Health Determinants, Occupational and Environmental Health, Methodological Issues in Immigrant Health Research, Ethical Issues in Research with Immigrants and Refugees, Ethical Issues in the Clinical Context. The second portion of the book consists of alphabetical entries that relate to the health of immigrants. Entries are interdisciplinary and are drawn from the following fields of study: anthropology, demographics, history, law, linguistics, medicine, population studies, psychology, religion, and sociology. Each entry is followed by a listing of suggested readings and suggested resources, and also links to related terms within the whole book. Outstanding Features The book adopts a biopsychosocial-historical approach to the topics covered in the chapters and the entries. Each entry includes suggested readings and suggested resources. The chapters and entries are written graduate level that is accessible to all academics, researchers, and professionals from diverse backgrounds. We consider the audience for the entries to be well educated, but a non expert in this area. The primary focus of the book is on the immigrant populations in and immigration to magnet countries. References are made to worldwide trends and issues arising globally. In addition to the comprehensive subject coverage the text also offers diverse perspectives. The editors themselves reflect the multidisciplinary nature of the topics, with expertise in psychiatry, law, epidemiology, anthropology, and social work. Authors similarly reflect diverse disciplines.
US-Mexico border region area has unique social, demographic and policy forces at work that shape the health of its residents as well as serves as a microcosm of migration health challenges facing an increasingly mobile and globalized world. This region reflects the largest migratory flow between any two nations in the world. Data from the Pew Research Center shows over the last 25 years there has never been lower than 140,000 annual immigrants from Mexico to the United States (with peaks over 700,000). This migratory route is extremely hazardous due to natural (e.g., arid and hot desert regions) and human made barriers as well as border enforcement practices tied to socio-political and geopolitical pressures. Also, reflecting the national interdependency of public health and human services needs, during the most recent five year period surveyed the migratory flow between the US and Mexico has equaled that of the flow of Mexico to the US--both around 1.4 million persons. Of particular public health concern, within the US-Mexico region of both nations there is among the highest disparities in income, education, infrastructure and access to health care--factors within the World Health Organization’s conceptualization of the Social Determinants of Health, and among the highest rates of chronic disease. For instance obesity and diabetes rates in this region are among the highest of those monitored in the world, with adult population estimates of the former over 40% and estimates in some population sub-groups for the latter over 20%. The publications reflected in this Research Topic, all reviewed from experts in the field, addressed many of the public health issues in the US Mexico Border Health Commission’s Healthy Border 2020 objectives. Those objectives-- broad public health goals used to guide a diverse range of government, research and community-based stakeholders--include Non Communicable Diseases (including adult and childhood obesity-related ones; cancer), Infectious Diseases (e.g., tuberculosis; HIV; emerging diseases--particularly mosquito borne illnesses), Maternal and Child Health, Mental Health Disorders, and Motor Vehicle Accidents. Other relevant public health issues affecting this region, for example environmental health, binational health services coordination (e.g., immunization), the impact of migration throughout the Americas and globally in this region, health issues related to the physical climate, access to quality health care, discrimination/mistreatment and well-being, acculturative/immigration stress, violence, substance use/abuse, oral health, respiratory disease, and well-being from a social determinants of health framework, are critical areas addressed in these publications or for future research. Each of these Research Topic publications presented applied solutions (e.g., new programs, technology or infrastructure) and/or public health policy recommendations relevant to each public health challenge addressed.
