Finding Ernesto: Temporary Labour Migration and Disabled Children’s Health

We seek to expose the implications of Australia’s exclusionary and discriminatory disability migration provisions on the health and wellbeing of disabled children who have arrived in Australia through alternative migratory routes. By undertaking an in-depth analysis of a single case study, Ernesto, we bring to the fore the key issues facing disabled immigrant children. These children, like our case study Ernesto, are only granted visas on the proviso that their parents/primary caregivers agree to cover the full costs associated with their disability, including medical care and additional expenses such as educational inclusion. The story of Ernesto reveals the extreme impact of these discriminatory policies on this population’s health and wellbeing. Further, we discuss how the state’s “right to exclude” people with disabilities from the migratory process negatively affects the health and wellbeing of their siblings and parents. 1. Introduction Disabled immigrant children, including refugees, rarely receive attention in the international research. The omission of this group from the international literature is, however, not surprising given that nation states have readily implemented a range of legal measures to effectively disallow either the temporary or permanent entry of disabled people across their borders [1–3]. Australia is no exception to this long-standing international trend, and since the inception of the Immigration Restriction Act (1901), disabled people (adults and children) have been actively excluded from the Australian migration process [4]. This process of exclusion has remained unchanged despite numerous changes to both migration and disability discrimination law [5]. The Migration Act of 1957 was explicitly exempted from the passage of the Disability Discrimination Act in 1992 [6]. Any migrant to Australia, even those granted international refugee status via the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, must meet the Health Requirement, for which a cost-benefit assessment of a health condition, under which disability is defined for migration purposes, is factored into a visa decision. While all applicants are required to endure this “health test” as a condition of entry, disabled people are considered to be “exceptions to the rule” where the Australian government automatically calculates and applies a maximum health cost as a means to activate its right to exclude certain potential migrants from the Australian polity [5] (see [7] for a full discussion of this point). Over recent years, there has been a limited number of empirical