Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The usual suspect medical and science journals have featured far fewer columns promoting progressive politics of late. Alas, it couldn’t last forever. The New England Journal of Medicine just published two opinion articles decrying immigration enforcement as inimical to public health.

The first column focuses generally on the adversity the author believes is caused to illegal immigrant communities by enforcing the law:

Current immigration enforcement is disrupting medical follow-up, exacerbating mental health symptoms, causing more patients to skip preventive care, and deepening mistrust in public institutions. In my clinical practice, I have seen sharp increases in anxiety, school absenteeism, deferred visits, and acute psychiatric symptoms after enforcement events. These effects are both predictable and preventable. Clinicians, health systems, and policymakers should recognize immigration enforcement as a social determinant of health currently implicated in a public health crisis and act accordingly. [Citations omitted.]

In other words, don’t enforce the law.

Mainstream bioethics discourse is often just progressive politics by a higher-brow name. Now, the Hastings Center — the world’s most influential bioethics think tank — has published an advocacy essay by Loyola University bioethicist Mark G. Kuczewski, who urges his colleagues to convince hospital administrators to thwart the attempts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to arrest illegal aliens at their institutions. Kuczewski laments the “fear” that the enforcement of immigration law is supposedly instilling in “immigrant communities,” somehow forgetting to note that whom he is really discussing are not immigrants in general but those here illegally. From “Supporting Patients and Students Who Are Immigrants: What to Do and Why Most Bioethicists Won’t Do It”: A devastating wave of fear now permeates immigrant communities. The rhetoric Read More ›