Category: Immigration

figurine with a void shape of a child and family of parents with a child. Surrogacy concept.

Regulating International Commercial Surrogacy

Hannah Rahim Leave a comment

By Hannah Rahim

In January 2024, Pope Francis called for a universal ban on surrogacy as a threat to global peace and human dignity, claiming that the practice is a “grave violation” of the mother and child’s dignity and based on the “exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs.” Surrogacy raises complex ethical and legal issues, particularly in cases of international surrogacy, where people seek surrogacy services from another country. There is currently no regulation of international surrogacy. Creating such regulation is important to allow appropriate access to surrogacy services while mitigating its harmful consequences.

Read More

Protesters holding signs that read My Body My Choice, Human right, Bans Off Our Bodies, Abortion Is Healthcare.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health and Its Devastating Implications for Immigrants’ Rights

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Asees Bhasin

While reproductive injustice against immigrants is not new, they are now even more vulnerable to reproductive oppression in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning the constitutional right to abortion.

Immigrant reproduction has long been vilified and opposed, with immigrant parents facing accusations of being hyper-fertile and giving birth to “anchor babies.” Additionally, pregnant immigrants have faced additional structural barriers to accessing necessary abortion care. This article explains how these injustices are likely to be exacerbated by the Dobbs ruling.

Read More

KYIV, UKRAINE - Feb. 25, 2022: War of Russia against Ukraine. A residential building damaged by an enemy aircraft in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv.

Misplaced Skepticism on Accountability for War Crimes Against Health Care in Ukraine

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Leonard Rubenstein

Russian attacks on hospitals, ambulances, and health workers in Ukraine — including more than 180 attacks confirmed by the World Health Organization, and double that number reported by the Ministry of Health — have gained global attention. In one case, viral photos document the evacuation of pregnant women, including one on a stretcher who later died, from a maternity hospital in Mariupol destroyed by Russian shelling. It is likely that investigations will show that many of these acts are war crimes. Accountability for these crimes must be pursued.

Read More

Sign at train station in Berlin that describes free support for pet owners coming from Ukraine.

Ethical Challenges Associated with the Protection of Pets in War

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment
(Photo: Sign at the central train station in Berlin (Berlin Hauptbahnhof) that offers free support for pet owners coming from Ukraine. Courtesy of Kristin Sandvik.)

By Kristin Bergtora Sandvik

Introduction

The care for animals rapidly became a part of the humanitarian narrative of the attack on Ukraine.

There are countless accounts of the efforts of activists, shelters and zoo staff to keep animals alive, as well as underground operations to get them to safety. And, as Ukrainians flee for their lives, they are frequently accompanied by their pets.

EU initiatives and advocacy efforts by animal rights groups pushed receiving countries to modify entrance requirements, waive fees, provide veterinary services, and shorten or eliminate quarantine times. The EU announced a special derogation in Regulation 2013/576, allowing the import of Ukrainian refugee pets without meeting standard requirements. Many governments have welcomed Ukrainian pets with or without their owners, and without documentation, rabies vaccine, and/or microchip.

Humanitarian action is typically human centric; this broad societal acceptance of pets as legitimate refugee companions, and the attendant rapid regulatory accommodations, are unique developments. In this blog, I draw on perspectives from disaster studies, international humanitarian law (IHL), refugee studies, and animal studies to articulate a set of ethical dilemmas around classification and policymaking that arise when pets are recognized as a humanitarian protection problem.

Read More

The Mexican-American border, with some construction still ongoing on the American side.

Pandemics without Borders? Reconsidering Territoriality in Pandemic Preparedness and Response Instruments

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

This post was originally published on the Verfassungsblog as part of our joint symposium on international pandemic lawmaking.

By Raphael Oidtmann

The COVID-19 pandemic has (yet again) disclosed that, in contemporary international law, the notion of borders resembles a distinct emanation of legal fiction, i.e., “something assumed in law to be fact irrespective of the truth or accuracy of that assumption.” This characterization of international borders holds particularly true with a view towards managing, containing, and countering the spread of highly contagious pathogens: especially in the context of responding to the global COVID-19 pandemic, it has hence become apparent that the traditional conception of borders as physical frontiers has been rendered somewhat moot. On the contrary, the pandemic experience has proven that a more flexible, fluid, and functional understanding of (international) borders might be warranted, also with a view towards (re-)conceptualizing international health law.

Read More

Envelope from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services with the American flag on top/U.S. immigration concept.

Health Justice for Immigrants, Revisited

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Medha D. Makhlouf

A major contribution of health justice is that it provides a framework for understanding how universal access to health care protects collective, as well as individual, interests. The pandemic has underscored the collective nature of the health and wellbeing of every person living in the United States, regardless of immigration status.

In a 2019 article, Health Justice for Immigrants, I adopted and adapted the health justice framework to the problem of disparities in immigrant access to subsidized health coverage. I argued that, in future health care reforms, health justice requires that immigrants be included in the “universe” of universal access to health care. In this blog post, I revisit this argument in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This blog post applies the health justice lens to inequities in immigrant health and access to health care, drawing out lessons for the pandemic and post-pandemic eras. It describes three examples illustrating the utility of health justice for catalyzing cross-sector initiatives to improve health, reducing the role of bias in the design of interventions to address health disparities, and ensuring that such efforts are serving the needs of historically subordinated communities.

Read More

Prison watch tower.

Government Report Finds Care Deficits for Pregnant People in Federal Custody

Elyssa Spitzer Leave a comment

By Elyssa Spitzer

Pregnant and postpartum people in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and U.S. Marshals Service receive care directed by policies that fail to meet national standards, according to a report recently issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). 

This, despite the fact that, incarcerated women are among the most vulnerable people, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. In the GAO report’s terms, incarcerated women: “often have medical and mental health conditions that make their pregnancies a high risk for adverse outcomes, which is compounded by inconsistent access to adequate, quality pregnancy care and nutrition while in custody.”

Notably, the report found that the BOP and U.S. Marshals’ policies failed to satisfy the national standards — to say nothing of the gaps that may exist between written policy and the care that is, in fact, provided. Read More

corridor with hospital beds

COVID-19 is a Perfect Storm of Hardship for US Immigrant Communities

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Amanda M. Gutierrez, Jacob Hofstetter, and Mary Majumder

The burdens of the COVID-19 pandemic are not borne equally. Immigrant communities, along with communities of color and people experiencing existing health inequities, are expected to face disproportionate effects.

This piece provides an overview of the spectrum of COVID-19-related risks – including socioeconomic hardship, vulnerability to infection, and challenges in access to care – faced by many of the 45 million immigrants in the U.S., especially those who are low-income or undocumented.

Read More

a crowd of people shuffling through a sidewalk

Lost in the Shuffle: The Impact of COVID-19 on Immigrants in Need

Stephen Wood Leave a comment

The recommendations for healthy people who have symptoms consistent with COVID-19, the illness caused by the corona virus called SARS-Co-V2, is to stay at home, get plenty of rest, drink fluids and control fever and body-aches with a non-steroidal medication. For people with pre-existing medical conditions, the elderly or those with more serious symptoms, an evaluation by a healthcare provider is warranted. This is a reasonable recommendation given that for most healthy people, the symptoms are uncomfortable but not life-threatening. There is a population however, that regardless of the severity of their illness, may stay at home and not seek medical care, even when things are serious. Fear of arrest and deportation is a real issue for undocumented immigrants and calling an ambulance or going to a hospital can put them at risk for these actions. The result is that some very sick people may not seek appropriate medical care. In addition, they may be taken care of by people that don’t have the appropriate personal protection, putting even more people at risk.

Read More

U.S.-Mexico border wall in Texas near a dirt road

Targeting Health: How Anti-Immigrant Policies Threaten Our Health & Our Humanity

wparmet Leave a comment

By Patricia Illingworth and Wendy E. Parmet

On May 19th of last year, Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez died of the flu while being held in a cell by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in south Texas. He was just 16, a migrant from Guatemala. Hours before his death, when his fever spiked to 103, a nurse suggested that he be checked again in a few hours and taken to the emergency room if he got any worse. Instead, Carlos was moved to a cell and isolated. By morning, he was dead.

Sadly, Carlos’s substandard medical treatment was not an isolated case. Between December 2018 and May 20, 2019, five migrant children died while in federal custody. All of them were from Guatemala. Their deaths were not accidental. Rather, they died as a consequence of harsh policies that are designed to deter immigration, in part, by making life itself precarious for migrants.

Since taking office, the Trump administration has instituted a wide-ranging crackdown on immigration. A surprising number of the policies the administration has instituted as part of that crackdown relate directly or indirectly to health. For example, in addition to providing inadequate treatment to sick migrants, CBP has refused to provide flu shots to detainees, despite the fact that influenza, like other infectious diseases, can spread rapidly in overcrowded detention facilities. In dismissing a CDC recommendation to provide the vaccines, CBP cited the complexity of administering vaccines and the fact that most migrants spend less than 72 hours in its custody before being transferred to other agencies, or returned to Mexico. These explanations lack credibility given how easy it is to administer flu vaccines. Read More