Special Issue Introduction

Migration, “illegality,” and health: Mapping embodied vulnerability and debating health-related deservingness

Part I: Debating deservingness

Around the globe, debates about deservingness are ubiquitous in public, policy, and NGO discussions of unauthorized migration and health. Although a handful of bioethicists have explored this contentious issue in a philosophical idiom (e.g. Coyle, 2003, Dwyer, 2004, Dwyer, 2009) and some clinicians have begun to debate it in medical journals (Anya, 2007, Arnold, 2008, The Lancet, 2008, Virgilio et al., 2007), relatively few social scientists have paid it serious attention to date (but see Grove

Part II – “Illegalization” and embodied vulnerability

Not only do unauthorized migrants tend to occupy the most ‘dirty, dangerous, and demeaning’ roles within local labor markets, but their “illegalization” and frequent criminalization also interact with a range of other “mutually reinforcing insults” (Quesada et al., 2011: 344; cf. Audy, 1971, Inhorn and Brown, 1997) to exacerbate their vulnerability to illness, injury, and violence as well as their likelihood of confronting tangible and intangible obstacles to health care. Put differently, the

Conclusion

Not only do unauthorized patterns of migration and immigration involve significant health challenges with far-reaching implications for diverse stakeholders, but they also pose a range of theoretical, methodological, and practical challenges for social scientists of health. In closing, we highlight three issues that will require attention as interdisciplinary inquiry into this complex constellation of challenges moves forward.

First, and perhaps most fundamentally, the “illegalization” of