This complex, somber book about US health care exposes how foreign nationals provide the United States with many health workers, even when they have no official right to receive that care. Historian of medicine Beatrix Hoffman notes that the many politicians who portray foreign nationals as a burden on medical resources ignore the fact that both the health care system and the immigration system are fundamentally broken. Of US nurses who died of COVID-19, 2030% were Filipino Americans and Philippine migrants. * Nature * A fascinating analysis of the American immigration and health care systems, asserting that both are broken and fail to meet immigrant needs for health care access or the needs of the US economy for a steady supply of immigrant labor. . . . Essential. * Choice * Hoffman is not only one of this nations leading historians of medicine, but with Borders of Care shes also proven to be a leading historian, period. She has bravely taken on our two most screwed up realms, the border and health care, and shown how intertwined they are. Every page features a telling story, an under-reported fact, a trenchant analysis. -- Brian Alexander, author of The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town In this deeply researched book, Hoffman chronicles the tangled histories of immigration and health care in the United States. She exposes a long-running conflict between our idealized values of universal care and the persistent fact of exclusionary policies. Through individual stories, collective campaigns, and analyses of larger structures of political economy, this history shows how the denial of basic rights has had immediate and mortal consequences. Hoffman also shows how people have organized in the face of tremendous opposition to make decent medical care a reality. This affecting and incisive work is essential reading for scholars, advocates, and policymakers. -- Luke Messac, author of Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine Borders of Care presents a sweeping and wide-ranging history of migrants treatment in the American healthcare system. Hoffmans vivid and engaging narratives offer fresh insights into migrants varied experiences of inclusion and exclusion, as well as how their activism helped establish new rights for all American residents. Timely and deeply illuminating, this book ultimately reminds us of the profound dysfunctions of Americas immigration and health care systems. -- Cybelle Fox, author of Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal Borders of Care provides a twentieth-century history of medical access, as seen through the experiences and campaigns of migrant communities, their advocates and their neighbors. By centering the century-long experience of immigrant communities, Borders of Care provides a guide to understanding the future of medical care in our multi-ethnic, transnationally connected United States. This is a model of inclusive, empathetic historical analysis. -- John Mckiernan-Gonzalez, author of Fevered Measures: Public Health and Race at the Texas-Mexico Border, 18481942
