title: Canada's non-status immigrants: negotiating access to health care and citizenship.
abstract: Illegal immigration in Canada is characterized mainly by non-status immigrants who legally enter Canada and stay after their legal status expires and by failed refugee claimants. For these persons, immigration status or its absence plays an important role in determining the degree of access to Canadian health care. This article situates the clinical setting as a site of contention and negotiation of citizenship and care in social networks as well as pragmatic and discursive strategies. Drawing on the case of a patient who faced imminent deportation and became suicidal, in this article I depict how psychiatrists and other health practitioners embrace "bearing witness" as an ethical practice, which intersects the medical and legal spheres.
authors.affiliation: Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, and Douglas Hospital Research Centre, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. alessandra.miklavcic@mail.mcgill.ca
authors.forename: Alessandra
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Miklavcic
mesh_terms: D060432:Anthropology, Medical; D002170:Canada; D054242:Emigrants and Immigrants; D006297:Health Services Accessibility; D006806:Human Rights; D006801:Humans; D008603:Mental Health; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D014171:Transients and Migrants