Public charge, legal estrangement, and renegotiating situational trust in the US healthcare safety net

Bibliographic Data

ID4084129
AuthorsMeredith Van Natta (0000-0001-9749-7815, University of California, Merced, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume57
Issue4
Pages531-552
Publication date2023-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLaw & Society Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0023-9216 • E-ISSN: 1540-5893
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1111/lasr.12683
OpenAlexW4388893414
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited40

US immigration law increasingly excludes many immigrants materially and symbolically from vital safety-net resources. Existing scholarship has emphasized the public charge rule as a key mechanism for enacting these exclusionary trends, but less is known about how recent public charge uncertainty has shaped how noncitizens and healthcare workers negotiate safety-net resources. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with 80 safety-net workers and patients in three US states from 2015 to 2020, I argue that intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding public charge has extended a sense of surveillance into clinical spaces in previously unexamined ways. Drawing on theories of medical legal violence, system avoidance, and legal estrangement, I demonstrate how these dynamics undermined immigrants' health chances and compromised clinic workers' efforts to facilitate care. I also reveal how participants responded to this insinuation of legal violence in healthcare spaces by promoting situational trust in specific procedures and institutions

Criminology · Health care · Immigration · Negotiation · Political science · Public relations · Public trust · Rhetoric · Safety net · Scholarship · Situational ethics · Sociology · Law · Migration, Health and Trauma · Policing Practices and Perceptions · Torture, Ethics, and Law

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