Hospitality for irregular migrants in the National Health Service: A challenge to the ethics of healthcare provision

What the paper says

This article demonstrates how hospitality is unsettled by welcoming acts that subject irregular migrants to border control through the National Health Service (NHS) in England. Drawing on the analysis of policy-relevant documents on healthcare and immigration published by the UK Government, as well as the grey literature produced by migrant charities involved in healthcare provision for migrants, it offers insight into both official approaches to healthcare and the responses articulated by organizations working with migrant communities. The analysis argues that bordering practices within the English NHS destabilise hospitality as a core principle of ethical healthcare. The article offers an original reading of immigration enforcement in the health service by using the lens of hospitality to examine how healthcare provision for irregular migrants blurs the boundaries between care and harm. Drawing on Derrida, the article examines how migrants’ experiences of guesting, along with the hosting practices of healthcare professionals, unsettle the stability of hospitality as a practice that supports health and well-being by nourishing a sense of homeliness. In this context, hospitality is framed as a practice through which healthcare professionals and migrants negotiate degrees of belonging, simultaneously shaping the healthcare setting as a moral space marked by both inclusion and exclusion, care and control. This intervention therefore extends debates at the nexus of hospitality and (global) bioethics by tracing how NHS staff involvement in immigration enforcement, as an ethico-political concern, frames (and is framed by) the movement of people across UK borders.