Irregular Migrants’ Precarious Access to Health Care in the Norwegian Welfare State

This chapter relies on an intersectional approach to explore the precariousness of irregular migrants and their access to health care in the welfare state Norway. Migration controls have increasingly been tied to limiting access to welfare services for those defined as illegal and undesired by the state. The term “precarious inclusion” highlights the unequal treatment of people with a variety of legal statuses in Norway, a society that prides itself on being egalitarian. Placed outside the care of the state, irregularized migrants in Norway become precarious subjects: partly included through media reports about them (as undesirable), through migration policies and healthcare exceptions (the right to emergency care) and simultaneously excluded through their limited rights and deportability. Drawing on fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with irregular migrants in Norway, this chapter examines the ways in which gender, age, ethnicity and (il)legal status intersect in irregular migrants’ precarious subject position. The chapter focuses on irregular migrants’ access to health care in Norway and the ways in which they navigate precarity. It demonstrates that the governmentality of precarious inclusion by and in the welfare state and the ways in which it is experienced by irregular migrants must be understood through an intersectional lens.