The Politicised Biology of Irregular Migrants: <i>Micropractices of control, tactics of everyday life and access to healthcare</i>

Abstract

Norway provides limited healthcare for irregular migrants, partly to make the country an unattractive option for 'would-be refugees'. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews, this article discusses the use of healthcare to regulate migration and how irregular migrants make use of different tactics (creative access, selfcare, ignoring symptoms and raison d'être) to gain access to healthcare despite legal restrictions. The migrants' tactics are adaptations to the micropractices of control and are about a diseased and politicised biology. They illuminate ways to care or not care for the body from a marginal position. This research, then, highlights how migrants work to restore a political life against the sovereign construction of them as mere biology. While some of these tactics are ways in which migrants can survive without healthcare rights in the short run, other tactics may contest and disrupt how the government is defining and treating irregular migrants in the longer run

Existential Displacement: Health Care and Embodied Un/Belonging of Irregular Migrants in Norway

“…Das and Poole 2004 ). Irregular migrants’ experiences of being stigmatized in the public sphere (by the media and politicians) and of social exclusion come to characterize their understanding of encounters with healthcare institutions (Bendixsen 2018 ) and generate a form of embodied unbelonging.…”

“…Research indicates that irregular migrants may have ambiguous relationships with friends and co-ethnics due to the uneven power dynamic that exposes irregular migrants to exploitation in the informal labor market (frequently recruited through friendships) and ‘survival sex’ (Bendixsen 2018 , Kjærre 2010 ). However, in the above quote John describes his friends as representing the necessary help and shelter he needed for survival, both in terms of material necessities and emotional and embodied belonging.…”

“…The current management of irregular migrants in Norway distinguishes between lives that are to be enhanced and lives that are not worth preserving (Das and Das 2007 ). This contributes to an exclusive politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis 2011 ) as it situates irregular migrants outside what Andrews ( 1999 ) calls the “political economy of hope”: the idea that in a free market economy, everyone can succeed under certain conditions.Though irregular migrants are socialized into irregularity (Bloch et al 2014 ), they find ways of exercising various modes of agency and attain degrees of control and resistance (Bloch et al 2014 ; Ellis and Rendón 2018 ; Bendixsen 2018 ) that allow them to re-establish a sense of belonging.…”

The Ageing Body as a Bordering Site: <i>Narrowing definitions of dependency for elderly family reunification in Finland</i>

“…Local healthcare professionals and their health assessments of the presumably dependent elderly thus play a vital gatekeeper role in immigration. In this way, the biopolitics of borders (Bendixsen 2018) affects the sick bodies of ageing migrants abroad, making their physical condition a marker of potential inclusion into the Finnish welfare state.…”

On the ethical dimension of irregular migrants’ lives: Affect, becoming and information

“…Mendoza and Morén-Alegret note how the becoming of migrants is materialised through the senses, which are often overlooked: ‘Individuals look, listen, taste, smell and touch, and it is in so doing that they build their experience of the world’ (2013: 762), and Campos-Delgado (2019) highlights how emotions are fully part of the space-making and becoming of migrants. Space-making is made of ‘migrants’ coping strategies, experiences and struggles’ (Tervonen et al, 2018: 140) and everyday tactics (De Certeau, 1984) of survival, including in the Nordic countries (Bendixsen, 2018).…”