Minerva Magazine offers a sample of projects by sophomore, emerging researchers in the Residential Colleges. Articles are written by students in the Capstone Courses of the Ashby and Strong Residential Colleges. Below is a repost from Minerva Magazine 2018.
Imagine this: You’re going to die. It’s not going to be quick or easy; in fact, it’s going to be incredibly slow and painful. You won’t even be able to do it with dignity; walking to the bathroom by yourself will be a long forgotten fantasy. You’re dying because you have cancer in your spine, and it’s left you paralyzed from the waist down. You can no longer work at your job, and your family has to carry you whenever and wherever you need to go. Usually it was to the hospital for chemotherapy, until that was ruled not to be an emergency treatment, and now you can no longer afford it. Life, or what’s left of it, is effectively hopeless. This is the story of Luis Jiminez, a man long forgotten by those sworn to uphold his rights, and it’s not unique to him. Uninsured immigrants aren’t dying because of any wrong they committed, but because they’re poor and uninsured, and the state has effectively given them a death sentence.
Most Americans sitting at home watching the evening news couldn’t imagine this scenario. If you told them that millions of people every day come to the realization that no matter how hard they have worked and how careful they were, in the end their ability to survive was systematically taken from them by people they would never meet, they would not believe you. If you told them that in America this was how we treat people who come in starry eyed with the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” emblazoned on their hearts and their minds, they would think you were crazy, that no country of theirs could willingly subject living, breathing, dreaming human beings to this reality.
Now imagine that you face this argument every day, struggling and trying to convince people living comfortably in their homes that the U.S. government is no haven for immigrants and that through the deprivation of their health insurance we eliminate their ability to live, let alone live comfortably. Jackie Teasley is trying to do just that. She’s not Hispanic or Latin American; this wasn’t a fight she was born to make, but it’s become one that she can’t turn away from. Being a person of color, she’s no stranger to how the United States treats those on the margins. After befriending an undocumented worker, Rosa, at her job over the summer, Jackie knew she would have to do something to bring to light the dark realities of being undocumented in the United States.
As a sophomore in Ashby College, she set out to research this issue and spread the information she found for her Capstone project. “My target audience was general, everybody,” she said when asked. “I think that a lot of people don’t understand the full range of problems found in the healthcare system, let alone how they affect people of color and immigrant populations.” Being an Anthropology major, Jackie knows how to study those living in cultures she is not a part of. On top of that she thinks her upbringing helped her contextualize the information and use it. She says she was lucky to have grown up around “all types of individuals with various backgrounds and identities,” a childhood that she believes was crucial in letting her truly care about these topics and issues, instead of “pretending they do not exist.”
Her project shows this dedication and passion, detailing thoroughly and explicitly many ways in which immigrants, both legal and illegal, are systematically prevented from obtaining insurance. The contemporary regulations on healthcare for Latino and Hispanic immigrants are discriminatory in nature and work to discourage migration to the United States. This discouragement takes the form of demanding citizenship qualifications that result in a lack of access to healthcare, expensive healthcare packages, and medical repatriations. In some cases she found where this even overrides constitutional law, which had originally required hospitals to provide emergency medical care, despite the legal status of an immigrant. Now it has been handicapped by the ACA, no longer able to provide that privilege of care to illegal immigrants. On top of this, the US has even implemented a system of “medical repatriation,” through which an undocumented patient needing care for chronic illness can be sent back to their country of origin. Many of these people left their home countries for troubling reasons, and the stark reality is that deportation can be a death sentence for them.
Jackie details the case of one man who, now unable to receive quality medical care after being forcibly moved to Oaxaca, Mexico, developed bedsores, lesions, and suffered multiple cardiac arrests. His very life was uprooted in a oway that almost made him lose it because he didn’t have insurance to cover his hospital stay. This is the reality that many like Rosa live with every day. They live with the constant awareness that at any moment of any day, they could not only be injured, but also lose all of their savings, their job, home, and even their family because they were denied insurance.
Jackie hopes that through this research she can arm people with the knowledge they need to fix the issues America faces today. One of the things that troubled her deeply was that, out of everyone she shared her research with, “more than half,” had never even heard of the information she had found. That fact not only troubles her but also offers an amount of solace. Nothing has been done to help these immigrants yet, but it’s a problem of a lack of knowledge, not a lack of caring.
She says that research like hers can help universities to expand their knowledge and awareness on issues like this to help current and future students. If everyone knew about this problem, then people could come together to demand new levels of change and “begin to work towards a more just and fair America.”
Interview by Daniel McLaughlin
Repost from Minerva Magazine 2018
The URSCO blog helps UNCG’s undergraduate scholars share their work and impact with the world. Interested in sharing your work? Contact URSCO Director Lee Phillips at plphilli@uncg.edu or Office of Research and Engagement Media and Communication Manager Sangeetha Shivaji at s.shivaji@uncg.edu.
