Pathogenic Policy: Immigrant Policing, Fear, and Parallel Medical Systems in the US South

ABSTRACT

Medical anthropology has a vital role in identifying health-related impacts of policy. In the United States, increasingly harsh immigration policies have formed a multilayered immigrant policing regime comprising state and federal laws and local police practices, the effects of which demand ethnographic attention. In this article, I draw from ethnographic fieldwork in Atlanta, Georgia, to examine the biopolitics of immigrant policing. I underscore how immigrant policing directly impacts undocumented immigrants’ health by producing a type of fear based governance that alters immigrants’ health behaviors and sites for seeking health services. Ethnographic data further point to how immigrant policing sustains a need for an unequal, parallel medical system, reflecting broader social inequalities impacting vulnerable populations. Moreover, by focusing on immigrant policing, I demonstrate the analytical utility in examining the biopolitics of fear, which can reveal individual experiences and structural influents of health-related vulnerability.

KEYWORDS:

• Undocumented immigrants
• immigration enforcement
• health care
• biopolitics
• policing
• parallel medical systems

Acknowledgments

The Institutional Review Board at the University of South Florida approved the fieldwork that led to this article. Thank you to Pierre Minn, Heide Castañeda, and the anonymous reviewers who provided feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. An especially large thanks to Sarah Horton for her thoughtful comments, and to David Brunell for reviewing numerous iterations of this article.

Funding

The National Science Foundation and the University of South Florida supported part of the fieldwork resulting in this article.

Notes

1. The Priority Enforcement Program continues fingerprint sharing and local law enforcement cooperation; there is little functional difference between it and Secure Communities.

2. Centro Hispanico is a pseudonym.

3. Bonesetting is a manual bodily healing, but hueseros, or bonesetters, can also provide other care (Hinojosa 2002).

Additional information

Funding

The National Science Foundation and the University of South Florida supported part of the fieldwork resulting in this article.

Notes on contributors

Nolan Kline

Nolan Kline is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rollins College. His research areas include im/migrant health, immigrant policing, biopolitics, and critical medical anthropology.