Undocumented Patients and the Not-So-Safe Safety Net

Caroline Rath,” Undocumented Patients and the Not-So-Safe Safety Net,” Hastings Center Report 43, no. 5 (2013):  inside back cover. DOI: 10.1002/hast.212

Abstract: Working in an urban safety net facility, my colleagues and I daily face any number of challenges. In some respects, an undocumented immigration status is just another one of those challenges. However, it is a particularly interesting one given the context created by political, social, and ethical debate about immigration.

Immigrant Health and the Moral Scandal of the “Public Charge” Rule

A long-anticipated policy change proposed by the Trump administration that would count the use of many federally-subsidized programs against immigrants currently eligible to use them threatens public health and would undermine ethical practice in health professions and systems. The policy would expand the definition of a public charge, someone likely to become dependent on government […]
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Beyond Breaking News: Ways of Seeing Migrants and Their Children

In his iconic 1977 essay on migration, A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of Migrant Workers in Europe, John Berger wrote: “To try to understand the experience of another it is necessary to dismantle the world as seen from one’s own place within it, and to reassemble it as […]
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Migrants’ Lives, Immigration Policy, and Ethics Work

The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was a mother separated from her child by a state policy of terror. During the 1930s, she and other mothers would gather outside a Leningrad prison, desperate for information. One day, after 17 months of “waiting in prison queues,” another woman whispered to her, “‘Could one ever describe this?’ And […]
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Shocking the Conscience: Justice Department versus the Health of Immigrant Women and Children

In April, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it would criminally prosecute migrants who had been apprehended after crossing the U.S.-Mexico. border. An immediate consequence of this announcement, explained in detail here, is the separation of children from their parents. Rather than being allowed to stay with their children in an immigrant detention center while […]
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