Immigration and Health in Rural Maryland

Since 1990, immigration to the United States has risen sharply, and rural areas have seen the highest increases. Thurka Sangaramoorthy’s work highlights the fact that the corporatization of health care delivery and immigration policies are deeply connected in rural America. Drawing from fieldwork that centers on Maryland’s sparsely populated Eastern Shore, she shows how longstanding issues of precarity among rural health systems, along with the exclusionary logics of immigration, have mutually fashioned a “landscape of care” in which shared conditions of physical suffering and emotional anxiety among immigrants and rural residents generate powerful forms of regional vitality and social inclusion. She connects the Eastern Shore and its immigrant populations to many other places around the world that are struggling with the challenges of global migration, rural precarity, and health governance.