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

摘要

In an important recent article on health rights and access for undocumented immigrant children, Ruiz-Casares and colleagues pose a crucial question that contains within it - almost as an afterthought, one might suspect - a second question that is fundamentally different in nature but no less important. Their query: "Which children (should) have the right to health care?" (2010: 330). The authors' explicit question focuses squarely on a matter of formal entitlement: Which children do have the right to health care? Nested in parentheses, however, is an implicit, second question that points in an entirely different direction: Which children should have the right to health care? Although posed only in passing, this second, parenthetical question spotlights a crucial issue that has not been well captured by our current theoretical lexicon: the complicated matter of health-related deservingness.