Description
Healthcare provision by the NHS has been framed in terms of hospitality: the service is portrayed as the home where healthcare staff should provide a welcoming reception of patients. In this view, hospitality articulates a normative commitment to humanity and a sense of universal care on the basis of equal human worth. However, healthcare for migrants challenges hospitality as a simply benevolent act of welcoming which seeks to cure bodies and alleviate suffering. Data-sharing policies enable the NHS to transfer migrant patients’ non-clinical data to the Home Office for purposes of enforcing immigration and controlling borders. In this context, healthcare as hospitality allows for a welcoming reception of migrants into the service, but also for hostility to be enacted towards them. By articulating Derrida’s notion of hospitality with Foucault’s analytics of power, this paper analyses the government of migration through health services delivered by the NHS. It focuses attention on the case of ‘illegal’ immigrants in England in order to explore how techniques of care, exclusion, surveillance and control operate to produce migrant bodies both as patients in need of medicine and risky subjects who threaten the possibility of security.
