What’s in a name? AP shifts the discourse by eschewing the term “illegal immigrant”

• Yesterday the Associated Press made the bold and surprising announcement that the AP stylebook will no longer sanction the term “illegal immigrant.” According to the AP’s new standards, “‘illegal’ should describe only an action, such as living in or immigrating to a country illegally, and not a person.”

• This announcement garnered swift responses — for instance, from David Weigel at Slate.com, who reflected on the role of activists in shifting discourse (including, above all, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas), and from New York Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan – who had asserted as late as October that the term is “clear and accurate.” Sullivan stuck to her guns even after interviewing veteran NYT journalist Julia Preston, who expressed dissatisfaction with Sullivan’s position.

Immigration Reform and Health Care: Leaving the Undocumented in the Breach – Lori Nessel

Lori Nessel
Seton Hall University School of Law

Any effort at comprehensive immigration reform must also address the health care needs of millions of immigrants with long-standing ties to this country. Absent such reform, immigrants needing ongoing medical care will remain vulnerable to the unethical practice of de facto deportation by hospitals, which is fueled by a lack of government reimbursement or oversight of international discharges.

In fact, a recent study from the Center for Social Justice and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest cites hundreds of cases of forced or coerced medical deportations. Acting alone or in concert with private transportation companies, as my colleagues and I report, hospitals are functioning as unauthorized immigration officers and engaging in de facto deportation of seriously ill or injured immigrant patients directly from their hospital beds to their native countries.

Flouting International Law: Violating the Human Rights of Asylum Seekers, Including Victims of Torture and Human Trafficking, in and en route to Israel – Laurie Lijnders

Laurie Lijnders
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel

My 15-year-old brother Habtom disappeared after he was released from an underground cell in the trafficking compound of Abu Khalid, where he was tortured for three months until we paid US$35,000 for his release, a young Eritrean woman told me during a visit to her home in a Tel Aviv suburb. Habtom, who fled forced military conscription and institutionalized slavery in Eritrea, was kidnapped in April 2012 from Shagarab refugee camp in Eastern Sudan by Rishyada tribesmen. Through a well-organized network of human traffickers operating in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, and Israel, he was transferred to the northern Sinai desert, near the Egyptian border with Israel.

The Israeli Ministry of Interior estimates that 60,000 African asylum seekers, mainly from Eritrea and Sudan, have arrived in Israel in recent years via the country’s southern border. According to Israeli human rights organizations, arriving asylum seekers face serious rights violations on both sides of the border.

Narrowing Our Moral Community of Concern: A Critique of Canada’s New Refugee Policies – Ben Langer

Ben Langer
Western University School of Medicine and Dentistry

The doctors of Canada are angry. Last May in Toronto, a group of 90 physicians clad in white coats and scrubs occupied the office of a high-ranking member of the Canadian Parliament. Since then, physicians have consistently interrupted press conferences held by Conservative members of Parliament to protest cuts to the country’s Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP), which since 1957 has provided basic health care to refugees and asylum seekers.

Under the new policy, many refugees will receive care only in “urgent and necessary” cases or if their illness is deemed a threat to public health. Ironically, these cuts came into effect on the July 1^st celebration of Canada Day, when this nation of immigrants and refugees celebrates its independence and its core values of generosity, openness, and multiculturalism.

Photo: Doctors for Refugee Care

“Doing No Harm” in an Age of Medical Repatriations: Challenges and Opportunities for Health Professionals – Juliana Morris

Juliana Morris
Harvard Medical School

How often do doctors cause harm to their patients when they discharge them from the hospital? For a sizeable group of immigrant patients who are “discharged” to their countries of origin each year, the answer may be: more often than not. The story of Quelino Ojeda Jimenez, an immigrant from Oaxaca, Mexico, who became quadriplegic after a fall at his roofing job in Chicago, Illinois, is case in point.

A Mile in Another’s Shoes on the U.S.-Mexico Border: “Being There” as a Form of Solidarity – Rachel Stonecipher

Rachel Stonecipher
SMU

As I walk through the Sonoran desert, my eyes move ahead to the next obstacle: another cluster of spiny branches eclipsing the way forward. The path ahead looks impassable, but I assume the people who left their discarded belongings strewn along the wash’s rocky bottom have pressed on. Maybe there are migrants here at this moment, too frightened to answer our calls in timidly pronounced Spanish: “Hola, somos amigos! Tenemos agua, comida, y ayuda médica! No tengan miedo!”[1] We’ve been walking for two hours, hacking through less forgiving plants and climbing up and down steep rock formations, to keep moving. Two hours into a four-hour loop, there’s no sense in turning around.

I am beginning to understand how people can die wandering around in circles. More than once, I panic that I am not holding our shared GPS device. When I am leading, I walk as briskly as I can following the dry, rocky creek beds, the only “paths” we can see, checking the GPS every few seconds. With cell phone signals out of the question, I imagine the fear of standing here with no compass but the sun.

Memorial in Arivaca, Arizona, to migrants who died crossing into the U.S. The memorial displays discarded items found in the desert by No More Deaths volunteers.
(Photo: Rachel Stonecipher)

Conceptions of Reciprocity: The Navarro Transplant Case, Organ Allocation and Undocumented Immigrants – Emily Avera

Emily Avera
TransplantInformers

Organ donors give the gift of life, but the sheer volume of patients hoping for transplants far outstrips donor generosity. How should we make decisions to ensure the equitable distribution of a limited supply of organs? In a system that depends on the goodwill of donors and public trust, this question becomes further complicated when undocumented immigrants seek transplants – especially in the United States, where undocumented immigrants consent to donate organs more often than they receive them. In light of this fact, should citizenship be a substantial consideration? Or should allocation decisions be made according to a claim of reciprocity – i.e., that individuals or groups who are willing to donate are more entitled to receive organs than others?

AccessDenied post wins 2nd prize in competition for Excellence in Writing to Advance Social Justice

Hearty congratulations to AccessDenied contributor Rachel Stonecipher, whose recent piece “Shattered by Security: The Impact of Secure Communities on Families” has been awarded second prize in the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center’s 2012 Student Prize Competition For Excellence in Writing to Advance Social Justice.

The prize, named for the renowned author of the monumental anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “recognizes outstanding writing by U.S. high school and college students that motivates positive action for social justice.”

Stonecipher is a senior double-major in Anthropology and Film & Media Arts at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. After college she plans to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology with a focus on medical anthropology, im/migration and health, the anthropology of experience, and public anthropology. She is currently engaged in the second phase of a two-year research project on the practice and experience of migrant advocacy work on the U.S.-Mexico border, supported by the Engaged Learning program at SMU.

“Shattered by Security” is Stonecipher’s second contribution to AccessDenied. An earlier co-authored piece, “Call It a Crisis: Confronting Public Health Risks on the U.S.-Mexico Border,” was published last August. Her third contribution, a reflection on her participant observation with the NGO No More Borders, which provides water and emergency medical assistance to migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, will be published shortly.

Congratulations, Rachel!

Fortifying the Boundaries of Deservingness: Israeli Government Steps up Policies of Exclusion towards Irregular Migrants – Nora Gottlieb

Nora Gottlieb
 Ben Gurion University of the Negev

On January 11, 2012, the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) passed an amended ‘Infiltrator Law,’ whose declared purpose is to deter irregular migrants and asylum seekers from entering the country. The law enables draconian measures, including three-year imprisonment without trial for entering the country illegally. In its original version, the law would have made assistance to irregular migrants punishable by up to 15 years imprisonment, but that particular paragraph was removed at the last minute.

Ironically, the logic of exclusion and securitization that underlies such laws has its roots in Israel’s self-concept as the homeland that guarantees the Jewish people protection and safety from persecution. The Infiltrator Law is part of a recent wave of policy decisions that solidify the denial of social and health rights to various (non-Jewish) migrant populations. Below I critically evaluate some of these recent policy developments in terms of their implications for the health rights of irregular migrants and asylum seekers in Israel.

Independence Garden, © Natan Dvir

New Special Issue of Social Science & Medicine – “Migration, ‘illegality,’ and health: Mapping embodied vulnerability and debating health-related deservingness”

Sarah Willen
University of Connecticut

Earlier this month, the journal Social Science & Medicine published a Special Issue — “Migration, ‘illegality,’ and health: Mapping embodied vulnerability and debating health-related deservingness” – that showcases the ongoing work of both the Initiative on Unauthorized Immigration and Health within the Society for Medical Anthropology’s Critical Anthropology of Global Health Special Interest Group and the AccessDenied community.

We are delighted to recap that volume here, and we encourage interested readers to access the individual articles via the journal’s website.[1,2]

In this new collection, we propose the time is ripe for rigorous interdisciplinary conversation about two urgent matters: first, the complicated but largely under-investigated matter of health-related deservingness, and second, the ways in which “illegality,” like other forms of marginalization and exclusion, can become literally embodied.