Health Care and Immigration ─ Understanding the Connections

This pioneering volume represents the culmination of state-of-the-art research whose purpose was to investigate the relationship between health care and immigration in the USA - two broken systems in need of reform. This volume sets out to answer the question: how do medical institutions address the needs of individuals and families who are poor, lacking English fluency, and often devoid of legal documents? The book provides an examination of the challenges faced by institutions aiming to serve impoverished people and communities desperately in need of help. It represents a comprehensive portrayal of two institutional arrangements affecting the lives of millions on a daily basis.

Health Care and Immigration offers accounts of the alternative paths used by immigrants to bypass dominant health-care organizations, and regional variations in health-care; the evolution and character of health-care legislation; factors explaining the persistence of altruistic institutions in a market economy, as well as the parts played by local legislation and social networks; and changes resulting from migration that affect the health of immigrants. This volume will be an invaluable resource for academics, researchers and students, as well as public officials addressing the health care needs of disadvantaged groups.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Patricia Fernandez-Kelly is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Princeton University, USA, and a Research Associate at the Princeton University Office of Population Research. She has written extensively on international development and globalization, immigration, and gender and development. Her latest book focuses on the experience of African-American families in West Baltimore.

Alejandro Portes is the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, USA. He is an internationally recognized scholar who has made enduring contributions to the fields of Latin American Urbanization, International Immigration, Institutions and Development, the New Second Generation in the United States and Europe, and Economic Sociology.