Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023
An Urgent Study on Immigration Enforcement and Health Care Access
Medical Legal Violence examines how punitive immigration policies systematically undermine the health of Latinx immigrants in the United States. This award-winning academic work provides critical insights into the intersection of immigration enforcement, health care access, and social inequality.
Comprehensive Ethnographic Research
Of the approximately 20 million noncitizens currently living in the United States, nearly half are "undocumented," which means they are excluded from many public benefits, including health care coverage. Additionally, many authorized immigrants are barred from certain public benefits, including health benefits, for their first five years in the United States. These exclusions often lead many immigrants, particularly those who are Latinx, to avoid seeking health care out of fear of deportation, detention, and other immigration enforcement consequences.
Author Meredith Van Natta provides first-hand accounts of how immigrants made life and death decisions with their doctors and other clinic workers before and after the 2016 election. Drawing from rich ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews in three states during the Trump presidency, Van Natta demonstrates how anti-immigrant laws are changing the way Latinx immigrants and their doctors weigh illness and injury against patients' personal and family security.
Critical Analysis of Safety-Net Healthcare
The book evaluates the role of safety-net health care workers who have helped noncitizen patients navigate this unstable political landscape despite perceiving a rise in anti-immigrant surveillance in the health care spaces where they work. Medical Legal Violence tells the stories of these immigrants and how anti-immigrant politics in the United States increasingly undermine health care for Latinx noncitizens in ways that deepen health inequalities while upholding economic exploitation and white supremacy.
Essential Reading for Scholars and Policymakers
As anti-immigrant rhetoric intensifies, this book sheds light on the real consequences of anti-immigrant laws on the health of Latinx noncitizens, and how these laws create a predictable humanitarian disaster in immigrant communities throughout the country and beyond its borders. Van Natta asks how things might be different if we begin to learn from this history rather than continuously repeat it.
