Qualitative analysis reveals advocacy strategies to navigate healthcare access barriers for migrants in Ontario, indicating critical pathways to care.
This article examines how individuals supporting migrants with precarious immigration status navigate institutional barriers to secure healthcare access in Ontario. Drawing on 47 qualitative interviews with migrant health advocates, it examines how ‘quiet’ situational, relational, and discretionary de/bordering practices shape processes of differential inclusion in healthcare. Participants described using these strategies to navigate institutional constraints and secure care for migrants excluded from formal coverage. While these practices often rely on dominant narratives of deservingness, they also create critical pathways to care within exclusionary health policies. This analysis reveals how advocates working within exclusionary institutions negotiate access in ways that both challenge and reproduce hierarchies of deservingness. This article contributes to social movement and bordering scholarship by conceptualizing quiet de/bordering practices as mechanisms that shape processes of differential inclusion in healthcare and illuminate the role of street-level advocacy in navigating exclusionary systems.
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Sarah Marshall (2026) studied this question.
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