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Immigration and health are two of the most contentious issues facing policy makers today. Policies that relate to both issues—to the health of newcomers—often reflect misimpressions about immigrants, their health, and their impact on health care systems. Although immigrants are typically younger and healthier than natives, and many newcomers play a vital role in providing care in their new lands, natives are often reluctant to extend basic health care to immigrants. Likewise, many nations turn against immigrants when epidemics strike, falsely believing that native populations can be kept well by keeping immigrants out. This book demonstrates how such reactions thwart attempts to create efficient and effective health policies and efforts to promote public health. The book argues that because health is a global public good and people benefit from the health of neighbor and stranger alike, it is in everyone’s interest to ensure the health of all. Reviewing issues as diverse as medical repatriation, epidemic controls, the right to health, the medical brain drain, organ tourism, and global climate change, the book shows why solidarity between natives and newcomers is ethically required and in the service of health for all.

Rape law reform has long been hailed as one of the most successful projects of second-wave feminism. Yet forty years after the anti-rape movement emerged, legal and medical institutions continue to resist implementing reforms intended to provide more just and compassionate legal and medical responses to victims of sexual violence. This book draws on interviews with over 150 local rape care advocates in communities across the United States to explore how and why mainstream systems continue to resist feminist reforms. The book weaves together scholarship on law and social movements, feminist theory, policy formation and implementation, and criminal justice to show how the innovative legal strategies employed by anti-rape advocates actually undermined some of their central claims. But even as its more radical elements were thwarted, pieces of the rape law reform project were seized upon by conservative policy-makers and used to justify new initiatives that often prioritize the interests and rights of criminal justice actors or medical providers over the needs of victims.

In Vaccine Court, Anna Kirkland tells the story of how a special no-fault compensation court in the United States handles very controversial claims that a vaccine has harmed someone. Vaccines are an important part of infectious disease control in our society and also touch us in very personal ways. While vaccines overall are extremely safe and effective, some people still suffer severe vaccine reactions and bring their claims to vaccine court. In this court, lawyers, activists, judges, doctors, and scientists come together, sometimes arguing bitterly, to determine whether a vaccine truly caused a person’s medical problem. Vaccine Court draws on the court rulings, observations at the court, and previously unstudied primary sources spanning the thirty years of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to ask how we know a vaccine injury. Despite all the controversy swirling around vaccines, this special court provides a place for reasoned argument and consideration of a range of evidence and perspectives that ultimately support the crucial role vaccines play in our society while also doing justice to people who have been harmed.