Where Medicine and Migration Policy Meet: Physicians’ Lived Experiences of Navigating Dual Loyalties in the Mandatory Reporting of Undocumented Patients

This interdisciplinary project aims to untangle the complexities involved in using medicine as a conduit for migration policy, when regulating physicians’ obligations to report undocumented migrants seeking care. The project aims to advance the state of the art in three ways.

First, by investigating physicians’ discourses in the public sphere through a critical framing analysis, a contemporary example of the unfolding of restrictive migration policy debates as they entre healthcare contexts will be captured, offering a composite mapping of reasoning and reactions presented, and illuminating various facets of how migration policies transcend societal institutions in the lived experience of physicians.

Second, by ethnographically exploring social and civil actions, understandings on the formation of protest and civil disobedience in questions relating to undocumented migration and healthcare rights will be illuminated, advancing knowledge on social movements in health and migration and the challenging of medical status and authority in society.

Finally, dissecting and analysing physicians’ perceptions and experiences in everyday work will provide more nuanced understandings of the factors underpinning a diversity of responses to migration policy in medicine, advancing knowledge on the roles of hierarchy, healthcare organisations, and the everyday burdens of medicine, which ultimately determine undocumented migrants’ inclusion into or exclusion from the public healthcare system.