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A study by researchers at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health examined the premature birth rate in NYC within US-born and immigrant mothers before and after the 2016 presidential election. The researchers decided to study birth rates as they can reflect population health. Risk factors for premature birth include stress and trauma.
"The new study found rates of preterm births overall have gone up since the election, but the trend is being driven by immigrant groups targeted by the Trump administration, especially Latinas. Non-Hispanic white women born in the US in the same period saw their premature birth rates go down slightly."
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The Toronto Latin American Film Festival (LATAFF), Sony Center Canada and the Centre for Spanish Speaking Peoples present: Trans Latina Ontario (TLO) Digital Stories.
A Q & A will also take place following the 8 short films: "Unbroken" by Celeste Bilbao-Joseph (Argentina) "He Found Himself Within Her" by Adalyn Díaz (Mexico) "It's Been a Long, Long Way" by Alex Freeland (Argentina) "Arrival of Miss Latismiere" by Gigi Latismiere (Mexico) "Thank You Canada" by Maria Clara De Sena (Brazil) "Why I'm Here" by Paulina (Mexico) "Confident Woman" by Tanya (Ecuador) "Ubuntu, I Am Because We Are" by Xica DaDiva (Honduras) The event is free and will take place on Friday, October 19, 2018 from 7:00-10:00 PM at the George Ignatieff Theatre in Toronto. University of Toronto's Hart House and The Centre for Community Partnerships are hosting a screening of the documentary Migrant Dreams, which highlights the exploitation of migrant workers in Canada who arrived through the Government of Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program. A discussion will take place after the screening with Dr. Rupaleem Bhuyan, Associate professor and Lead Investigator of The Migrant Mothers Project, and Sara Asalya, Palestinian immigrant and one of RBC’s top 25 immigrants of Canada.
The event is free and will take place on Oct. 10, 2018, 6-8:30 pm in the East Common Room of Hart House. An opinion piece published in The Globe and Mail by Y.Y. Brandon Chen, Assistant Professor at the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Law, highlights how we must not exclude irregular migrants from healthcare.
Currently, people residing in Canada with irregular legal status are typically not able to access any health benefits and are required to cover the cost of health necessities and emergencies themselves or depend on charities. Mr. Chen conveys that "people who are often mislabelled as 'illegals' are actually a diverse group and their life situations are typically much more nuanced than what the simplistic label conveys. Most irregular migrants in Canada have had permission to be here at one point and only fell out of such legal status some time later." The film ‘I Am Rohingya: A Genocide in Four Acts’ will be playing at the University of Toronto on October 9th, 2018 at 6:30PM.
The film documents the "journey of fourteen refugee youth who take to the stage to re-enact their families’ experiences in Burman and beyond; before, during, and immediately after the escalation of military violence in their native homeland, Rakhine state; their unforgiving escape by foot and by boat to makeshift camps in Bangladesh; and their eventual resettlement in the strikingly un-familiar Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario." A Q&A period with the director and the cast will take place following the screening. At a time when the number of migrants and displaced persons around the world is dramatically rising and the debate in Canada is becoming increasingly ideological and polarized, the Global Migration and Health Initiative organizes a conversation on refugees today - their identity, reality, and the challenges they face, health and health-related but not only - as seen by three presenters who contribute quite different if complementary perspectives. The three presenters will be:
1. Jean-Nicolas Beuze UNHCR Representative in Canada 2. Cynthia Guignard Former Volunteer, EuroRelief, Moria Refugee Camp, Lesvos, Greece 3. Andrea A. Cortinois Assistant Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health Co-Director, Global Migration and Health Initiative The event will take place on October 4, 2018 from 5-7 pm at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health in Toronto. Registration is now open. The event is co-sponsored by the Juxtaposition Global Health Magazine, Health Studies Students' Union (HSSU), and the Office of Global Public Health Education & Training at DLSPH. The federal government is reviewing a decision of the United Nations Human Rights Committee that says Canada violated the rights of Neil Toussaint, an undocumented irregular migrant, by denying her crucial health care.
The UN Human Rights committee determined in its ruling that "under the optional protocol of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, even illegal aliens have an inherent right to life." The committee's decision said: "Member states cannot make a distinction, for the purposes of respecting and promoting the right to life, between regular and irregular migrants." They ruled Canada should provide Toussaint "adequate compensation for the harm she suffered," and "review its national legislation to ensure that irregular migrants have access to health care." In an article published in the Knowable Magazine, occupational health researcher Marc Schenker of UC Davis discusses the hazards and potential solutions to address why migrants are especially vulnerable to workplace injuries. Schenker describes how the power imbalance between employers and immigrant workers, who have few rights, forces migrants to take risks that put their health in danger. He states several migrant workers lack access to health care since nations restrict the benefits they can receive, or workers are afraid to claim existing services.
"In the United States, the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries found that immigrant workers were 15 percent more likely to be fatally injured on the job than those who were native-born." For many people people in Ontario, lack of accessible healthcare is related to their immigration status. According to a Healthy Debate article, around 500,000 people living in Ontario do not have access to OHIP, the government’s health insurance plan for residents of Ontario. Those without any official immigration status in Canada have no access to OHIP.
For example, in 2015, "among those without insurance were 89,000 newly landed permanent residents (who go without OHIP for three months); some 85,000 temporary workers (who similarly go at least three months without OHIP, and longer depending on their work situation); and almost 54,000 international students (both post-secondary and younger), who have no access to OHIP at all." Daniel Trilling's article in The Guardian outlines the "dangerous new development in European politics." Trilling states that "until now, the effort to filter out and deter unwanted migrants from reaching Europe has generally been pursued by politicians of the liberal centre, and part of their justification for doing it is that these unpleasant but necessary policies will stave off a rightwing populist backlash."
He claims that when far-right politicians, such as Italy’s Matteo Salvini, gain positions of power in numerous nations, their influence becomes real. Their goal, "rather than to make a perceived problem go away, is to deliberately stoke a sense of crisis and panic, to frame this form of migration as an existential threat to Europe." |
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