Health

Abstract

Chapter 4 focuses on health care, the sector that is perhaps the most transnational and hybridized. This chapter explores the transnational dynamics of care from six perspectives: (1) health care professionals on the move, (2) medical institutions that operate transnationally, (3) individuals accessing medical care through remittances, (4) the provision of health care for undocumented migrants, (5) medical tourism and travel, and (6) the global governance of health care in the context of transnational migration. This analysis reveals the core tension at the heart of the emergent hybrid transnational social protection regime: increased social protection for some may come at the expense of increased precarity for others, whether a public health system in the Global South decimated by brain drain or the shift of health care resources away from local patients to well-heeled international patients. In the middle of these competing factions lies the state, and as the COVID-19 pandemic has made clear, governments and their citizens ignore the integral role of transnational actors in public health—both as providers and as patients—at their own peril.