Mobilizing for Life: Illegality, Organ Transplants, and Migrant Biosociality

This chapter shows that undocumented migrants are deeply implicated in a politics of health and citizenship. It examines migrant health activism in terms of biosociality, a form of citizenship in which individuals and groups come together around a shared biological state or identification – a specific disease, corporeal vulnerability, genetic risk, embodied harm, somatic suffering, and so forth. The chapter takes up the notion of biosociality to understand how undocumented migrants mobilized around their biology to make citizenship claims. It emphasizes that this mobilization took place in a context where the illegality of the migrants served as powerful mobilizing force. Indeed, the migrants did not just mobilize around their biology, but also around their political status as undocumented migrants. What ultimately brought them together was the suffering undocumented body. Indeed, the biologically damaged and suffering "illegal" body served as crucial source of legitimacy for undocumented access to health care rights.