The legal violence of care: Navigating the US health care system while undocumented and illegible

Medical sociologists widely conceptualize illegality as a social determinant of health, implicating immigration law but not health care law in immigrant health disparities. Contributing to an emerging literature on legal violence in the context of health care, I explore how the Harris Health System in Houston, Texas legally affects low-income undocumented migrants' lives as they seek care. Drawing on eleven months of ethnographic and interview research with migrants and volunteers at a community-based organization, I argue that the health care system legally exacerbates migrant vulnerability in particular ways. Clerical staff follow medical protocol to deny migrants care on the basis of legibility (i.e., a photo ID), not legality (i.e., legal status), resulting in two classifications of illegality - what I term legible and illegible illegality. The former keeps migrants visible to the state but offers potential care, and the latter legally relegates migrants to the exploitative conditions of informal home care and/or a protracted state of suffering where, for many, death is the only recourse. This research shows that without substantive health reform, health practitioners - physicians, social workers, clerical staff, and home care workers - play an (in)direct role in shaping and normalizing immigrant health disparities.