Kuehlmeyer Katja, Klingler Corinna, and Huxtable Richard (eds) (2019) Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects of Health Care for Migrants: Perspectives from the UK and Germany. Routledge. 290 pp
| Published date | 01 December 2020 |
| Author | Gwyneth Lonergan |
| Date | 01 December 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12796 |
Book Review: Kuehlmeyer Katja, Klingler
Corinna, and Huxtable Richard (eds) (2019)
Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects of Health
Care for Migrants: Perspectives from the UK
and Germany. Routledge. 290 pp
Gwyneth Lonergan*
Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects of Health Care for Migrants:Perspectives from the UK and Ger-
many makes an interesting and welcome contribution to scholarship on migrant health. The volume
gathers contributions from a wide range of viewpoints, including legal, sociological, ethical and
activist, such that it may be of use to many different scholars, and anyone interested in the subject
of migrant health more broadly. Some of the chapters are more descriptive, providing, for example,
an outline of the legal barriers certain migrant groups face when accessing care (e.g. Chapters 6–
7), while others grapple with theoretical issues, such as the social constructedness of ethnic and
migration categories and its implication for health research (Chapter 9).
The basic premises of the book are outlined by Kuehlmeyer, Klingler and Huxtable in their intro-
duction. First, they make it clear that the volume uses the term migrant in a broad sense and is
committed to recognizing actual diversity of migrants as a group and the complexity of migrants’
lives. Second, they argue that, from an ethical perspective, there can be no justification for restrict-
ing migrants’access to health services. Finally, they discuss some of the difficulties associated with
research into migrant health, including the lack of data collected around migrant health, and the
fact that, when data are collected, it can easily be used in problematic ways. As they point out,
there is a tendency to slip from depicting migrants as at risk of certain infectious diseases, to
migrants as posing a risk as potential transmitters of these diseases. It should also be noted that,
between November 2016 and November 2018, the UK National Health Service (NHS) did share
patient data with the UK Home Office so the latter could find immigrants believed to be breaching
immigration regulations. As such, it was very reasonable for migrant patients to be reluctant to co-
operate with the kind of data collection that could support research into migrant health.
The commitment to recognizing the diversity and complexity of migrants’lives is of great impor-
tance given that both academic and popular discussions can often grossly simplify migrants’experi-
ences and ignore the differential impact of multiple social factors on migrants’health. Jayaweera
(Chapter 2), for example, critically engages with the “acculturation discourse,”which suggests that
migrants in Western countries pick up “bad habits,”like smoking and drinking, as they integrate.
She points out that this ignores wide ranging patterns of “unhealthy habits”in migrants’countries
of origin, as well as the diversity of behaviour in host countries –rates of smoking and drinking in
the UK vary by locality. Moreover, this “acculturation discourse”ignores the structural barriers to
*Lancaster University –Sociology, Lancaster, Lancashire, UK
doi: 10.1111/imig.12796
©2020 The Authors
International Migration ©2020 IOM
International Migration Vol. 58 (6) 2020
ISSN 0020-7985Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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