Foreign Girl Forever – Einat Fishbain

Einat Fishbain

Lily Oudraogo was born in Tel Aviv, and that’s where she lived and died. Twenty-five difficult and insulting years on the margins of society, and beyond, reached an end on June 6, likely from complications of preeclampsia (a pregnancy-related condition involving high blood pressure, among other factors). Her younger son, Ben-El William, born less than a week earlier, is still in the neonatal department at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Hospital. Her five-year-old son Michael is with friends from the local Ghanaian community who are trying to help. Francis, Lily’s partner for the past three years, wanders the halls of the hospital, fluctuating between courteous smiles at those offering consolation to spells of crying, anger, and helplessness. It is hard to imagine a sadder and more senseless end to the life of a woman who spent her entire life trying to survive in the land of her birth.

Lily was born in 1989, the second daughter of unauthorized migrant workers from Ghana who had arrived in Israel a few years earlier, leaving their older daughter in Ghana.

Bodies on the Line: Fighting Inhumane Treatment with Hunger in Immigrant Detention – Megan Carney

Megan Carney
Arizona State University & University of Washington, Seattle

“Heeeeyyyy Obama! Don’t deport my mama!” I marched alongside dozens of protestors as they shouted these words from outside the Northwest Detention Center (NDC) in Tacoma, Washington, on March 11, 2014. Some 1,200 detainees at NDC had initiated a hunger strike four days earlier, issuing a handwritten list of demands to GEO Corp, the private prison company responsible for overseeing site operations. At the top of their list: better food.

In publicizing the protest, El Comite Pro-Reforma Migratoria Y Justicia Social[1] said hunger strikers were “putting their bodies on the line” for both better food (better, that is, than the bare potato served cold almost every day) and better treatment, better pay, lower commissary, and fairness. The number of huelgistas de hambre (hunger strikers) declined to 750 on day 2, 330 on day 3, and continued to spiral downward until only a handful of strikers remained at the time of the protest. GEO Corp had previously warned strikers that if they continued to refuse food for more than 72 consecutive hours, they would be put on medical watch and possibly force-fed. Immigration attorney Sandra Restrepo, speaking through a megaphone to an audience of protestors, shared her suspicion that detainees had likely withdrawn from the strike as a result of intimidation by guards.

Anthropology Afflicting the Comfortable: A Review of Seth Holmes’s “Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies” – Rachel Stonecipher

Rachel Stonecipher

Having cut my teeth in anthropology while living in the state of Texas, I am accustomed to trying to explain what, exactly, this discipline is. At Thanksgiving, distant family members ask me whether I have anything interesting to tell them about the dinosaurs. When I correct them and confess that I neither dig up artifacts (certainly not T-Rex) nor analyze crime scenes, but rather practice “cultural” anthropology, I watch their shoulders sink and eyes wander away.

Seth Holmes’ book Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies[1] is here to change that, and in the best of directions. In a tight 200 pages, Holmes lays out a call to action for social scientists, practicing physicians, and average readers to identify and combat the structural violence perpetrated against migrant farmworkers. By accompanying his companions as they migrate, work, and seek health care, Holmes sheds light on the “ethnicity-citizenship hierarchy” that shapes the health outcomes of indigenous Triqui migrant workers on a farm in the Skagit Valley of Washington state. His goal is to perform a “critical and reflexively embodied anthropology” that will “confront the ways in which certain classes of people come to be written off or deemed less human” (40-44). The idea of reflexive embodiment is to think about one’s own ways of sensing the world – such as feeling pain, love, or success – in critical comparison to how others sensorially experience. Holmes is on a trail parallel to the recent ethnographic movement, led by Sarah Willen,[2] to interrogate the social inequality (re)produced when undocumented migrants come to embody their abject status. However, as I argue below, his approach is more akin to discourse analysis than Willen’s “critical phenomenology,” though it would be strengthened by more of the latter.

Defects in the Safety Net: When the Emergency Option is the Only Option – Sural Shah

Sural Shah
Cambridge Health Alliance & Harvard School of Public Health

Ana, age 29, came to the clinic for a sore throat, her two energetic children in tow. While her kids darted around the clinic space, which was donated by a local academic medical center, I introduced myself as a volunteer physician and began asking about her medical history. As Ana moved from her chair to the exam table, she told me she had traveled from Mexico to the United States as a teenager and now was living here illegally, a familiar story among patients in the largely Latino and impoverished Philadelphia community our non-profit clinic[1] serves. Moving my stethoscope around her chest, I was surprised to hear a harsh murmur suggesting problems with the blood flow through her heart. 

The U.S. Border Patrol’s “Low-Intensity War”: Ill-Conceived and Inhumane – Rachel Stonecipher

Rachel Stonecipher
SMU

In a previous AccessDenied post, I considered how the institutional culture of the U.S. Border Patrol often neglects the medical needs of migrants. Despite policies calling for “humane treatment,” agents regularly destroy humanitarian water bottles in the desert, allow overcrowding in detention, deny medications, and commit acts of physical violence. Moreover, as Seth Holmes writes in a recent post, the Border Patrol’s stated policy of “prevention through deterrence,” which aims to deter future migration by making the journey north as difficult as possible, is inhumane.

As the agency predicted, and as Holmes notes, the increase in Border Patrol personnel and surveillance since 1994 has forced migration routes into the remote desert, increasing suffering.

The Danger of U.S. Border Patrol Policy – Seth M. Holmes

Seth M. Holmes
University of California, Berkeley

The U.S. Senate’s recent agreement – to increase the size of the Border Patrol by 20,000 agents, add 700 miles of fence, and deploy $3.2 billion in military equipment – may lead to an increase in deaths in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands if current policies continue. Most media coverage, however, has failed to mention that Border Patrol policies and actions directly contribute to these fatalities.

One recent example is an article titled, “In 30 days, Border Patrol rescues 177 people from Arizona desert,” published last month in the Los Angeles Times. The article noted that although fewer people are crossing the border overall, death rates are at an all-time high in the southern Arizona desert. It blamed the spike in fatalities on the fact that migrants are increasingly crossing the border at its most treacherous and remote points. Yet the article failed to point out that Border Patrol policies have contributed to these deaths by deliberately re-routing migrants to cross in regions so perilous that Border Patrol officials themselves have referred to them as “the corridor of death” (Doty 2011).

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.

Reading Between the Lines: Need to Know’s “Crossing the Line” Suggests a Reexamination of the Border Patrol’s Culture – Rachel Stonecipher

Rachel Stonecipher

SMU

In 2012, a series of PBS investigations into Border Patrol abuses corroborated years of humanitarian volunteers’ reports, finding that the agency’s institutional culture cultivates a climate of medical neglect – and sometimes outright harm – toward migrant detainees. In July 2012, the PBS show Need to Know aired the second installment of its U.S.-Mexico border series “Crossing the Line,” an investigation into abuses of migrants in Border Patrol custody. The program reported that agents in the Tucson Sector, the busiest of nine regional divisions of the Border Patrol on the U.S.-Mexico border, have been accused of thousands of physical, verbal, and sexual abuses against migrants who are usually deported before they can report the crimes. “Crossing the Line, part 2” focused on the problem of poor treatment during detention, while Part I addressed agents’ excessive use of force. In light of my own research with humanitarian volunteers,[1] the two programs prove the frequency and injuriousness of abuse. Although PBS stops short of claiming that the Border Patrol’s “war on illegal immigration” actually promotes harm against migrants, to some volunteers’ dismay (including my own), “Crossing the Line” effectively conveys that abuse is an institutional problem that takes direct and indirect forms – including impunity.

“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.