An overview of the ethics of immigration Carens, Joseph H.
Critical review of international social and political philosophy,
09/2014, Letnik:
17, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This essay discusses the ethical issues raised by immigration to rich democratic states in Europe and North America. The article identifies questions about the following topics: access to ...citizenship, inclusion, residents, temporary workers, irregular migrants, non-discrimination in admissions, family reunification, refugees, and open borders. It explores the answers to these questions that flow from a commitment to democratic principles.
•Outward migration is common in Zimbabwe, with many migrants crossing the borders illegally.•Females also migrate using the informal routes and have heightened vulnerabilities as their rights are ...violated by males who assist them in crossing the borders and prey on them.•This study reports different challenges women face during migration and the deportation process.•There is a window of opportunity in addressing and reducing illegal migration through the transformation of policies to protect women migrants.
Migration is a common and visible feature of global mobility where the driving factors would be the search for better livelihood opportunities. Due to economic hardships in Zimbabwe, women have also been noted to migrate to neighbouring countries in search of opportunities to look after their left-behind families. However, the COVID-19 restrictions and other state regulations have become facilitators of illicit migration as irregular migrants (including women) devise more complex means to traverse borders and gain access. This paper assesses the vulnerabilities and the lived realities of female irregular migrants between Zimbabwe and Botswana during the clandestine migration journeys.
A qualitative descriptive survey that targeted nineteen (19) participants was conducted using semi-structured and unstructured interviews. The participants included fifteen (15) Female irregular migrants and four (4) Key Informants who worked at Plumtree Border Post. The interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, coded and thematically analysed.
Four vulnerabilities were reported/experienced by the participants: violence and robbery, Rape and sexual harassment, Psycho-emotional harassment, and health vulnerabilities in detention. The participants reported that these vulnerabilities are experienced at different levels of the migration process and deportation.
Female migrants are generally at risk as they are bound to be taken advantage of at different levels during migration and deportation. Therefore, there is a need to relook at the policies implemented at the ports and ensure women are subjected to humane treatment even during the deportation process.
The association between the football industry and the trafficking of West African youth has captivated academic, media and political interest. This article uses football trafficking as a case study ...to think through the broader conception of mobile African male bodies in football migration and trafficking discourses. I contribute to and move beyond existing literature on African football migration by stepping away from structural approaches currently used to conceptualise this migratory process. This is achieved by bringing migrants' subjectivities to the fore, and in doing so I also provide a novel critique of policy responses to irregular football migration. The article draws on data obtained from migrants who left West Africa for Europe, exploring the journeys these would-be footballers took, and their trajectories and circumstances after arrival. The central argument is that existing policy responses frame irregular football migrants as being 'better off at home'. Problematically this creates a tension as for many of these migrants their country of origin is precisely where they do not want to be. Consequently, many remain in destination countries illegally without any means of subsistence.
Introduction: The European Union receives one third of the world’s migrant population who cross the Mediterranean Sea in small boats and arrive illegally in Europe. Irregular migrants (IMs) are ...persons who do not have legal permission, documentation, or refugee status and are not authorized to enter or stay in a given country. More than half a million IMs arrive in the European Union by sea creating serious public health issues in Greece, Italy, and Spain, thereby needing emergency care. The purpose of this study was to describe and understand the experiences of IMs who arrive in Spain by small boats in terms of cultural issues surrounding the provision of emergency care. Method: A qualitative study based on Gadamer’s phenomenology was used. Data were collected between 2015 and 2018 using 12 in-depth interviews of IMs. Results: Three main themes arose: “IMs driven by a culture of emigration in countries of origin,” “Facing risk in search of a better life,” and “The need for cultural adaptation in emergency care.” Discussion: Biopsychosocial and cultural needs must be addressed when providing emergency care to IMs who arrive in Europe by small boat. Implications: Nurses can help adapt and restructure cultural practices in the emergency care provided to IMs.
Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) regularly report data on their work with uninsured migrants (UM) within a (so-called) parallel health care system. The role and involvement of public authorities ...therein have yet been underrepresented in research. Our aim was to gain a better understanding of public authorities' role in the parallel health care system and their view of the health situation of UM. We conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews with 12 experts recruited by purposive sampling from local public health authorities (LPHAs), state-level public health authorities (SPHAs), and social services offices (SSO) in nine cities, recorded, transcribed, and subjected the data to qualitative content analysis. LPHAs are more often directly involved in providing medical services, while SSOs and SPHAs function as gatekeepers for access to social benefits, including health insurance, and in grant-funded projects. NGOs keep substituting for the lack of access to regular health care from public institutions, but even in settings with extended services, public authorities and NGOs have not been able to provide sufficient care through the parallel health care system: Experts report gaps in the provision of health care with respect to the depth and height of coverage, due to the fragmentation of services and (ostensible) resource scarcity. Our study highlights the necessity for universal access to regular health care to overcome the fragmentation of services and improve access to needed health care for UM in Germany.
More than 150,000 irregular migrants reside in Israel, yet data regarding their utilization of and perceived barriers to health care services are limited. Drawing on semi-structured interviews ...conducted with 35 irregular migrant adults between January and September 2012, this article analyzes the role of migration as a social determinant of health for irregular migrants, and especially asylum seekers. We analyze two kinds of barriers faced by migrants when they attempt to access health care services: barriers resulting directly from their migration status, and barriers that are common among low-income communities but exacerbated by this status. Migration-related barriers included a lack of clear or consistent legislation; the threat of deportation; the inability to obtain work permits and resulting poverty and harsh living and working conditions; and discrimination. Barriers exacerbated by migrant status included prohibitive cost; poor and confusing organization of services; language barriers; perceived low quality of care; and social isolation. These findings support recent arguments that migrant status itself constitutes a social determinant of health that can intersect with other determinants to adversely affect health care access and health outcomes. Findings suggest that any meaningful effort to improve migrants' health will depend on the willingness of clinicians, public health officials, and policymakers to address the complex array of upstream political and socio-economic factors that affect migrants' health rather than focusing on narrower questions of access to health care.
•Highlights migration status as a social determinant of health.•Shows how this social determinant intersects with others to harm migrants' health.•Highlights upstream factors impeding access to healthy work, living conditions.•Insists migration's role as a social determinant of health demands policy attention.
The recent Affum decision (judgment of 7 June 2016, case C-47/15) represents a new step forward in the case law of the Court of Justice on the detention of irregular migrants. The Court, departing ...from its previous case law in Achughbabian and El Dridi, adopts a rather pragmatic approach, preferring to stick to a procedural argument (to forbid detention in order to ensure a fast return procedure) rather than indulging in the assessment of the compliance of the detention with fundamental rights. This new approach seems to facilitate the cooperation between the EU level and national administrations. The Court seems, however, driven more by the need to secure the effectiveness of the return procedure rather than the rights of the individuals involved.
Abstract
Over the last 7 years, a multidimensional crisis in Venezuela has resulted in massive emigration. Over 7 million have fled the country, with more than 2.4 million seeking to settle in ...Colombia. Of these, as of 2021, more than 1 million were undocumented, but the situation has started to change with the implementation of an ambitious migrant regularisation scheme. Regularisation promises access to comprehensive healthcare, full educational opportunities and the formal labour market. Securing these social determinants of health is critical because social inequalities produce health inequalities—that is, systematic health differences that are preventable and thus unjust. Social medicine, social epidemiology and international human rights law agree on this, yet law-focused studies of health equity initiatives remain rare. Aiming to reverse this, we examine Colombia’s response to Venezuelan migration, including its recent migrant regularisation initiative, which was introduced in part to comply with the country’s obligations under international human rights law. The examination foregrounds what we are calling ‘legal literacy’, testing the hypothesis that advancing health equity involves asking more and better questions about international human rights law.
In the context of increased global mobility, it is fundamental to understand migrants' needs and how governments can ensure equal health opportunities for both regular and irregular migrants simply ...by applying low-cost primary health care measures. To identify health issues in which to intervene, this study analysed the impact of a mother's lack of legal status, together with available biological and socioeconomic characteristics, on four indicators of adverse perinatal outcomes in Switzerland.
Based on the exhaustive records of the Swiss Federal Statistical Office (FSO) for its Vital Statistics (BEVNAT), different indicators of birth outcomes, including preterm birth (PTB), low and very low birth weight (LBW and VLBW), and small for gestational age (SGA), were analysed using logistic regressions on live births occurring from 2005 to 2018. These four adverse outcomes were defined as dependent variables. Statistical analysis was performed using the statistical package STATA, version 17.
Selected pregnancy outcomes were conversely affected by an irregular legal status. Analysis run on the final sample showed that, compared to the neonates of mothers who are non-migrant legal residents in Switzerland, newborns of irregular migrants have higher risks of PTB (aOR 1.18 95% CI 1.05-1.32, p<0.01) and VLBW (aOR 1.43 1.13-1.81, p < 0.01). In contrast, we observed that in both irregular and regular migrant groups, the odds of SGA were lowered (aOR .76 .68-.85 p<0.01) and aOR .93 .91-.94, p< 0.01, respectively). A similar effect was observed when controlling for any adverse outcome (any AOs) (aOR .90 .83-.99 p 0.022; and aOR .93 .91-.94 p< 0.01, respectively).
Our results, together with those from the available literature, call for a more comprehensive assessment of all pregnancy outcomes as well as of the social determinants of health for which the analysis was adjusted. Given the complexity of the migration phenomenon, future studies should account for local structural restrictions in the organization of care, the extension of a person's network as a means of health care accessibility, diverse backgrounds and cultures and the recent arrival status of migrants. This would allow researchers to understand the long-term impact of social determinants of health on the wellbeing of a mother and child and take them into account in the adoption of health policies.
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