HEALTH AND HEALTHCARE ACCESS FOR UNDOCUMENTED MIGRANT AGRICULTURAL WORKERS IN GREECE

Abstract

There are an estimated 200,000 Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Indian migrants in Greece, most of whom are undocumented men. Undocumented migrant workers are estimated to make up 90 percent of agricultural labour in Greece. The nature of agricultural work significantly increases risk of injury and illness for workers through demanding physical labour, occupational stress, and exposure to pesticides. Under Greek law, undocumented migrants have access to free public healthcare only in emergency situations but must pay out-of-pocket otherwise. This project, driven by the political economy of migration and discourses of health, race, and citizenship looks at how health outcomes and healthcare access for undocumented migrant workers in Greece. It asks how social, political and economic structures, including citizenship status, policies of migration governance, healthcare costs, and racism, impact health outcomes and encounters with the healthcare system for migrant workers. Examining the case study of South Asian migrant men working in the fields around the two agricultural towns of Manolada and Megara, this thesis will draw on an intersectional theoretical framework that combines concepts from critical political economy, migration studies, and health anthropology, to demonstrate how migrant workers experience worse health outcomes as a result of the structural vulnerabilities engendered within racial capitalism and their “illegal” citizenship status. These structural vulnerabilities produce and organize the everyday suffering of workers on a through the enacting of labour demands, the enforcement of such demands, and financial pressure, and have been central in upholding the exploitative conditions in which migrants live and work. The disposability of migrant workers is compounded by “illegal” citizenship status, as undocumented workers are denied the rights and protections of the state and are under constant threat of deportation and detention. Both institutional and societal discourses of migrant “illegality” and anti-migrant racism work to reproduce the exploitative labour arrangement and serve to justify the state of disposability and precarity in which migrant workers live.