Healthcare, Migrations, and Everyday Bioethics: Weighing the difference

This work uses the lens provided by the everyday bioethics perspective to assess the weight of the difference, which currently overwhelms migrants in both maintaining psychophysical wellbeing and accessing adequate healthcare services in host countries. I will start by outlining the main risks for migrants’ health during their transit, as well as the main obstacles usually preventing them from accessing adequate healthcare services in receiving countries. I will elaborate by trying to shed light on the association between people movement and the spread of infectious diseases, which arguably represents the core of current political debate and tensions over international migration flows. Thereafter, I will continue by looking at the interplay of detention, migration and healthcare, in which both illegal and legal migrants are often entrapped because of their intrinsic precarious conditions. I will then highlight the main challenges associated with socio-cultural misconceptions in health and healthcare that exacerbate health inequalities to the detriment of migrant people. In the conclusions, I will try to build on the everyday bioethics approach of Giovanni Berlinguer by speculating what its contribution may be to both bioethics and the attempt to enhance the protection of migrants’ health.