Description
Healthcare provision by the NHS is framed by an ethical framework fleshed out in values and principles that should inform the service in everything it does. Values such as dignity and ‘everyone counts’, as well as principles such as ‘healthcare based on clinical need, and not ability to pay’ reveal a normative commitment to humanity and a sense of universal care on the basis of equal human worth. From this perspective, healthcare is provided as an act of hospitality: the NHS is the ‘home’ which welcomes the ‘ill’ by providing the ‘gifts’ of curing bodies and alleviating suffering. However, this promise of hospitality seems to be troubled by the figure of the migrant. Data-sharing policies between the Home Office and the NHS allow migrants’ non-clinical data to be deployed for immigration enforcement, blurring the boundaries between healthcare and border control. By articulating Derrida’s notion of hospitality with Foucault’s analytics of power, this paper explores how hospitality in the NHS operates techniques of power that enable a welcome of migrant patients into the service while enacting hostility towards them. I illustrate my argument by focusing attention on the COVID-19 pandemic as an instance where healthcare intersects with immigration enforcement through the NHS. In doing so, I analyze how the ‘migrant’ disrupts hospitality as a simply benevolent act of welcoming, and explain the operation of techniques of exclusion, surveillance and control of migrant bodies through the delivery of health services in England.
