News Round Up In-Brief

AccessDenied has added this feature in order to keep our readers informed of news items and reports from around the web on unauthorized im/migration and health. If you have items you would like us to include, please email: contactaccessdenied@gmail.com.

Updates from the US:

• NPR’s Morning Edition ran a story on behind-the-scenes efforts by prison companies to draft and ultimately pass Arizona’s SB 1070 as part of a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants.

• A leading immigrant advocate insists that plenty of unauthorized migrants work hard, pay taxes and pay for their own health care.

Who picked the strawberries you ate for breakfast? “Afflicting the comfortable” as pedagogic strategy – Sarah Willen

Sarah S. Willen
SMU

Do unauthorized im/migrants have a right to health? To medical care? To publicly funded care? These questions – all of them vexing, provocative, and contentious – catalyze the work we do here at AccessDenied, where we aim not to provide pat answers, but to serve as a clearinghouse for fresh ideas and resources of intellectual and practical value. Sometimes, though, we wonder how much preaching we do to the choir. What about those who find it reasonable, logical, or common sensical to declare unauthorized im/migrants automatically “undeserving” or, more commonly, those who have not (yet) given the matter any serious thought – including, quite frequently, our students?

In this post, I consider these questions through two lenses: first, a rallying cry issued 20 years ago by critical medical anthropologist Merrill Singer, and second, a recent pedagogical adventure in the Green Mountains of Vermont. I’ll begin with the rallying cry.

News Round Up In-Brief

AccessDenied has added this feature in order to keep our readers informed of news items and reports from around the web on unauthorized im/migration and health. If you have items you would like us to include, please email: contactaccessdenied@gmail.com.

International updates:

• France could still be sued by the European Union in the coming weeks if it is found to have violated anti-discrimination laws with its expulsion of Roma migrants, the union’s justice chief said.

• Asylum and immigration issues were focal points in Australia’s recent election campaign. The government has now unveiled plans for more detention centers to accommodate an increasing number of asylum seekers, as well moving children and family groups from detention into community-based accommodations as part of a more “humane” approach.

• In the UK, three security guards have been arrested over the death of a man on a plane at Heathrow Airport, as he was being deported from the UK to Angola.

News Round Up In-Brief

AccessDenied has added this new feature in order to keep our readers informed of news items and reports from around the web on unauthorized im/migration and health.

If you have items you would like us to include, please email: contactaccessdenied@gmail.com.

International updates:

• In recent months, the French government has expelled more than 1,000 Roma (or Gypsy) immigrants, framing its actions as part of a crackdown on illegal immigration and crime. This week France announced that the country is now willing to alter some of its laws in response to European Commission complaints that followed the deportations.

• A report on Germany released this week indicates that negative attitudes toward foreigners living in Germany have increased so much during 2010 that a third of Germans say they want foreigners repatriated.  This follows remarks made by a leading politician last week that Turkish and Arab migrants were no longer needed.

• In the Netherlands, the new prime minister was sworn in and pledged an era of tighter regulation of immigration but distanced himself from the anti-Islam philosophy of populist politician Geert Wilders.

Updates from the United States: