Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

While the COVID pandemic may have revealed the weaknesses of the American health care system, this compelling book based on research undertaken before the pandemic emerged shows the devastating consequences those weaknesses were already imposing on immigrants and their families before worldwide contagion struck. Based on rich ethnographic research across red, blue, and purple states, Van Natta (Univ. of California, Merced) demonstrates that anti-immigration politics have created what Giorgio Agamben refers to as a "state of exception" (the title of his translated book, published in 2005), wherein extreme measures may be enacted to manage a political crisis. In this case, the perceived crisis is immigration. Van Natta shows that the intersection between immigration law, surveillance methods, and medical care has fostered a consistent practice of "medical legal violence" that has many impacts on immigrants, from threat of deportation to the effects of suboptimal health care, resulting in a widening of existing health disparities. Arguing that the systematic devaluing of Latinx immigrant lives and labor undergirds this practice, with often fatal consequences for immigrants in health crisis, the author highlights the need for much policy reform related to immigration, labor, and the broken American health care system--which in some instances may put individuals at risk of greater harm instead of healing.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.