Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Introduction: Migration and Health

1987; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 21; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2546605

1747-7379

Jeffrey S. Evans,

HIV/AIDS Impact and Responses

Migration and health are interconnected in many surprising ways. The topic has insinuated itself into many important population and health issues in the past and promises to continue the tradition into the future. For example, 100 years ago the health of immigrants was one of the most pressing public health problems in the United States. In response to the fear of diseases such as yellow fever, cholera and tuberculosis, the Marine Hospital Service facility was established on Staten Island to screen immigrants who were suspected of bringing diseases into the country with them. In the attic of this facility, a research laboratory was set up to take advantage of the research opportunities created by the immigrant screening. One hundred years later the successor to this laboratory is to celebrate its centennial as the National Institutes of Health. Just as in 1887, the premier public health issue in 1987 is another dread disease thought to be related to immigration as well as patterns of internal migration and residential mobility and its name is AIDS. In fact, AIDS might turn out to be a critical factor regulating both future immigration and the naturalization of undocumented aliens already in the country. This illustrates how migration and health interrelate. Migration can give rise to public health issues and also create research opportunities to examine phenomena related to population movement. Investigation of migration and health often forces us to acknowledge that the types of migration (international, internal, and residential) interact with each other as well as other population parameters such as the age/sex structure, sexual activity, fertility, mortality, and family structure. Research on migration is often obscured by these interactions. In fact, the adoption of a health perspective in the design of migration research represents a substantial improvement over traditional approaches that are based on distinctions among the various types of population movement. This is because a health perspective treats population movement as a dynamic process by which individuals are related to specific locations by reason of their parti? cipation in human networks. In other words, migration is regarded as a human process rather than a discrete event, and accordingly, it becomes less important to categorize the event and more important to describe the individual's involvement with human networks and the institutions sustaining them. IMR Volume xxi, No. 3 v