Bordering and Disordering in the National Health Service

Recent immigration legislation in the UK has extended the internal reach of the UK’s border. The intensification of everyday bordering has introduced immigration checks into more and more everyday encounters and required more UK residents than ever before to check the immigration status of others (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss & Cassidy, 2019). In this paper, I begin by exploring what this shift has meant for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and healthcare workers, arguing that it has disordered the delivery of healthcare services. I then move on to demonstrate that the advent of everyday bordering has also, however, opened up new spaces to resist and disorder processes and practices of bordering, as well as illustrating why health care has become a key site for the disordering of everyday bordering amongst a wide range of actors. In particular, I explore how the campaigning work of migrant support organisations and other groups intersects with mundane practices of everyday resistance by workers within the NHS itself.