On otherness and rigths: media and normative narratives about migrants´ access to public health

Abstract

At the beginning of 2018, bills were proposed to regulate free access to public health services and higher education for those international migrants who did not qualify as “permanent residents”, based on the “reciprocity” criteria. For almost two weeks, these projects concentrated a large media attention, establishing themselves as a priority issue on the public agenda. Through the analysis of these projects and their treatment in the hegemonic digital press, this work aims to explore the narratives that circulated in relation to migrants’ free health access and also investigate the symbolic effects produced by the hypervisibility of a particular political position on the subject. A qualitative methodology focused on discourse and content analysis is used in order to both analyze the links between legal discourse and media discourse, and also to investigate the way in which the narratives circulating through the hegemonic media institute and are instituted by the social imaginary about free access to health for migrant population. As a result, it was possible to identify three discursive operations: (a) the displacement of the idea of health as a right to health as an object of diplomatic negotiation based on reciprocity; (b) the association of the collpase of health services with the migrants demand for care, which operates by concealing the structural nature of the health system deficiencies, linked to the regressivity of neoliberal policies with regard to the recognition of basic social rights, such as health; (c) the denial of these others under the mechanism of the scapegoat, representing them as a “social threat” and as the “unworthy” of the gratuity.