Discussing rights and wrongs: Three suggestions for moving forward with the migrant health rights debate
Claims for improving migrants’ access to care often draw on universalistic ethical notions, such as the principle of equity as it is specified in human rights law and public health ethics. These claims contrast with political realities across most welfare states. In the underlying public discourses, the frontline arguments against greater inclusion have often focused on practical concerns, such as the costs of healthcare provision. Yet it has also been suggested that ultimately context‐specific moral frameworks play a key role in demarcating legitimate right‐holders from undeserving others. Hence, is this a conflict between ethical principles and practical concerns? Or between different ethical perspectives? And why would that question matter? We propose that awareness of the nature of the arguments involved and respect for different ethical views are critical for coherent and constructive debates. This paper looks at the ways in which ethical concepts are used to justify exclusionary policy decisions. In particular, it examines the rationales that inform health policies towards documented and undocumented labor migrants in two welfare states, Germany and Israel, through the qualitative analysis of policy documents and 71 in‐depth interviews. The study points to the central role of particular concepts of health‐related deservingness. These results lead to the proposition that the fundamental clash in the discussion on migrants’ access to care is one, albeit not solely, between contrasting ethical perspectives. Drawing on process‐oriented approaches to ethical decision‐making, the paper concludes with three suggestions for moving forward with the migrant health rights debate.
Immigration Detention in the United States: Identifying Alternatives That Comply With Human Rights and Advance Public Health
This article examines the global pandemic, COVID-19, through the lens of responses to vulnerable migrants, asking what state responses mean for the future of human rights values and for humanitarian interventions. The responses of the Australian state are developed as a case study of actions and policies directed at refugees and temporary migrant workers through the COVID-19 pandemic. The theoretical framing of the article draws on racial capitalism to argue that the developments manifest during the ‘crisis times’ of COVID-19 are in large part a continuity of the exclusionary politics of bordering practices at the heart of neoliberal capitalism. The article proposes that a rethinking of foundational theoretical and methodological approaches in the social sciences are needed to reflect contemporary changes in justice claims, claims that increasingly recognize the multi-species nature of existential threats to all life.
What's "Justice and Dignity" Got to Do with It?: Migrant Vulnerability, Corporate Complicity, and the State
In 2001, Tyson Foods, one of the world's leading chicken processors, was indicted on charges that it recruited undocumented migrants to work in its plants across the rural United States. In the following years, Tyson engaged in an operation to purge the largest chicken plant in the country of hundreds of unionized immigrant workers, relying heavily on the Social Security Administration's controversial "No-Match" program to shape its termination practices. In response, a local campaign called for "Justice and Dignity" in the form of an improved corporate policy that would simultaneously serve the interests of the company, its workers, and their communities. This article chronicles that localized struggle and its national aftermath, illuminating the far-reaching effects federal "employer sanctions" have had on transnational corporations and their policymakers, on workers of different backgrounds, and on strategies used to advocate for worker rights. Politically engaged ethnography reveals how differentially positioned actors navigate and experience the neoliberal immigration and employment laws of the United States while deepening our understanding of the workings of the poultry industry, the recruitment of immigrant workers, and the anthropology of organized labor.
What is a migrant? And is she a revolutionary?
Rather, temporary or undocumented status means that a person is excluded from basic labour protections, health care, education, and other social services while being separated from their families by immigration laws that bar sponsorship. [...]the struggle for migrant justice (including the campaign for Full and Permanent Immigration Status for All) is not just for the "right to stay" but for all civil, political, labour, and economic rights from which migrants are excluded when they are deemed "temporary" or made undocumented. [...]migrants have a shared universalizable experience that can both propel collective action for social transformation and be used by the richest few to pit migrants against local residents, particularly low-waged and poor people. For this threat of replacement to be effective, social support systems must be made weak enough to make even a brief period of unemployment untenable. [...]the first part of the 20 th century in North America and Europe, the local labour force faced labour exploitation, while hyperexploitation was carried out against indentured workers and enslaved people. [...]temporary migration is being expanded both as a mechanism to undercut local worker power and to satisfy the neverending drive for profit by creating a subclass of workers who can be exploited and excluded differently.
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