Education Resources

About the Module

Author

Beatrix Hoffman, professor of history at Northern Illinois University, is a historian of the U.S. health care system, health reform, and social movements. She is the author of The Wages of Sickness: The Politics of Health Insurance in Progressive America (University of North Carolina, 2001) and Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States since 1930 (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and coeditor of Patients as Policy Actors (Rutgers, 2011). Her work has been supported by awards from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She previously served as guest curator for the National Library of Medicine exhibition, For All the People: A Century of Citizen Action in Health Care Reform. She is working on a study of immigration and the right to health care.

Suggested Use

The Immigrant Health, Health Services, and History module can be used to introduce the topic of medicine and health into higher education courses in U.S. immigration history, sociology, or politics, or to bring the study of immigrant and migrant health into courses in public health, health policy, and the health professions. It allows students to examine the ways in which medicine and health have been a central part of the immigrant story, and how health policies and practices have been used to admit, exclude, integrate, and discriminate against immigrants. It focuses on health and medicine as integral to immigration policy in the U.S., from medical inspections in the late 19th century to the exclusion of undocumented immigrants from Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The module also invites students to study the experiences of immigrants, and how immigrant interactions with the health system have changed over time. It considers how immigrants themselves have sought to empower their communities by providing and advocating for adequate health services.

Each of the five classes includes a brief introduction, five to eight primary and secondary sources, and discussion questions. The sources range from historic photographs to current health policy articles and research. The questions intend to guide the students to make connections between history, public health, and immigration policy. Some assignments ask students to imagine history from the point of view of immigrants and health providers, and to brainstorm innovative ways to address current health challenges. The module is appropriate for the following types of college or university courses: history of medicine, immigration history, sociology, political science, anthropology, social services, social work, community and public health, nursing, community organizing, and ethnic studies.

Objectives

After completing this module, students are expected to demonstrate an understanding of:

• U.S. immigration and health history, from the 1890s to the present
• how to utilize primary and secondary sources to analyze important questions in immigration and health history
• the connections between health care policy and immigration policy
• the role of immigrant self-help, advocacy, and protest in fighting medical stigmatization and gaining access to health services
• the problems facing immigrants and health care providers today, and some potential solutions