Medical Exclusion

Did you know that if the late Stephen Hawking had wanted to settle in Canada, he would likely have been denied? This is because he was disabled.

Federal immigration law and policy and practices to which these give rise exclude people with chronic illness and developmental or genetic difference from permanently settling on health grounds, with some exceptions. “Medical inadmissibility” is the official term of the state decision-making process involving bureaucratic and professional practices organized to detect, diagnose, and exclude such persons because of assumptions made about them.

Rhetorically, the immigration system is understood to enable immigrants to create a good life in Canada. Elided from this interpretation, however, are the lives that people lead after they are rejected for residency, or what their lives end up being about.

more info

Screening Out is critically important to scholarship in (im)migration and health. Its concrete recommendations for policy change are key.

Jennifer A. Liu, University of Waterloo

Medical Exclusion

Did you know that if the late Stephen Hawking had wanted to settle in Canada, he would likely have been denied? This is because he was disabled.

Federal immigration law and policy and practices to which these give rise exclude people with chronic illness and developmental or genetic difference from permanently settling on health grounds, with some exceptions. “Medical inadmissibility” is the official term of the state decision-making process involving bureaucratic and professional practices organized to detect, diagnose, and exclude such persons because of assumptions made about them.

Rhetorically, the immigration system is understood to enable immigrants to create a good life in Canada. Elided from this interpretation, however, are the lives that people lead after they are rejected for residency, or what their lives end up being about.

more info

Screening Out is critically important to scholarship in (im)migration and health. Its concrete recommendations for policy change are key.

Jennifer A. Liu, University of Waterloo

ABOUT THE PROJECT

project team

bibliography

links

The Medical Exclusion Project seeks to document first-hand experience applying for Canadian permanent residency when an application is unsuccessful under the excessive demand clause. The focus is on people’s return to and readjustment in their home country or another country.

As such, this institutional ethnographic inquiry starts in the circumstances and aftermath of exclusion of would-be immigrants. The objective is to produce new knowledge about the ways in which the immigration department’s medical inadmissibility regime enables and constrains the lives of people inside and outside of Canada, while examining broader implications of bureaucratic and professional practices.

What are the consequences of these relations? For whom do these arrangements matter? Why should we care? How might we resolve barriers for the betterment of individuals, families, and society-at-large?

This work contributes to the medico-legal borderlands vein of scholarship. This concept refers to spaces of professional practice where the institutions of law and policy, medicine and health care, and education and social services co-exist and overlap.

This project received start-up funding from the Canadian Bar Association’s Law for the Future Fund.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

The Medical Exclusion Project seeks to document first-hand experience applying for Canadian permanent residency when an application is unsuccessful under the excessive demand clause. The focus is on people’s return to and readjustment in their home country or another country.

As such, this institutional ethnographic inquiry starts in the circumstances and aftermath of exclusion of would-be immigrants. The objective is to produce new knowledge about the ways in which the immigration department’s medical inadmissibility regime enables and constrains the lives of people inside and outside of Canada, while examining broader implications of bureaucratic and professional practices.

What are the consequences of these relations? For whom do these arrangements matter? Why should we care? How might we resolve barriers for the betterment of individuals, families, and society-at-large?

This work contributes to the medico-legal borderlands vein of scholarship. This concept refers to spaces of professional practice where the institutions of law and policy, medicine and health care, and education and social services co-exist and overlap.

This project received start-up funding from the Canadian Bar Association’s Law for the Future Fund.

project team

links

bibliography

web design by Peter Keighron: www.wherebutwhen.com

Medical Exclusion

Did you know that if the late Stephen Hawking had wanted to settle in Canada, he would likely have been denied? This is because he was disabled.

Federal immigration law and policy and practices to which these give rise exclude people with chronic illness and developmental or genetic difference from permanently settling on health grounds, with some exceptions. “Medical inadmissibility” is the official term of the state decision-making process involving bureaucratic and professional practices organized to detect, diagnose, and exclude such persons because of assumptions made about them.

Rhetorically, the immigration system is understood to enable immigrants to create a good life in Canada. Elided from this interpretation, however, are the lives that people lead after they are rejected for residency, or what their lives end up being about.