Structural vulnerability: migration and health in social context
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Abstract
Based on the authors’ work in Latin America and Africa, this article describes and applies the concept ‘structural vulnerability’ to the challenges of clinical care and healthcare advocacy for migrants. This concept helps consider how specific social, economic and political hierarchies and policies produce and pattern poor health in two case studies: one at the USA–Mexico border and another in Djibouti. Migrants’ and providers’ various entanglements within inequitable and sometimes violent global migration systems can produce shared structural vulnerabilities that then differentially affect health and other outcomes. In response, we argue providers require specialised training and support; professional associations, healthcare institutions, universities and humanitarian organisations should work to end the criminalisation of medical and humanitarian assistance to migrants; migrants should
Seeking Protection in a Pandemic: The Impact of COVID-19 on Asylum
Border restrictions put into place during the pandemic have severely limited the ability of people fleeing violence and persecution to ask for protection. A recently-released study by the Jesuit Refugee Service and Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of International Migration, Seeking Protection in a Pandemic: COVID-19 and the Future of Asylum, analyzed the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on asylum
processes in the US and other countries. Drawing on the experiences of JRS field staff, the study looks particularly at restrictions on asylum in the US, Mexico, Colombia, Australia, the European Union and South Africa. The study finds that border restrictions implemented to protect the public against COVID-19 will have long-lasting impacts on US and global asylum policies and that these restrictions amplified existing inequalities between displaced and host populations. Join us for a presentation of this r