The State of Art on Migration and Health: the Unelucidated Role of Health in Shaping Migration Decisions
Responding to global calls for comprehensive research on health and migration articulated during the 2nd Global Consultation on Migration and Health, recent literature emphasizes the impact of migration on health outcomes and the urgent need for inclusive healthcare policies for migrants. Most of this body of work often frames the “healthy migrant effect” as the main health-related determinant of migration, emphasizing that only healthier people dare to migrate if excluding medical tourism. Although these studies provide valuable contributions to the global commitment to “leave no one behind,” as enshrined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 5), they reproduce a narrow framing of health as a determinant of migration. The role of illness, disability, and chronic conditions within households in driving undocumented migration remains insufficiently studied although these later are frequently linked to poverty traps and intergenerational inequalities.
Our lecture provides a critical overview of the state of the art regarding migration and health with the aim of deepening the understanding of their bidirectional relationship. We highlight the overlooked reverse relationship between migration and health and discuss the largely unelucidated role of health in shaping migration decisions, with a focus on undocumented mobility. We expand the analytical focus beyond the individual, exploring how collective health concerns shape migration decisions, offering a novel perspective that situates health not only as an outcome but as a driver of mobility. This approach emphasizes the importance of how familial and community health burdens can generate both motivation and necessity for migration, especially in low-resource contexts. Our lecture provides insights for research, policy, and interventions aimed at addressing health-related vulnerabilities in migrant populations not only in host countries.
Dr. Charlie Yves Ngoudji Tameko is a research affiliate at the Centre for Social Inequality and Governance Studies (CEDESOG), member of the research group ‘Development, inequality and environment’ and member of the scientific comity of the association ‘Jóvenes por la Investigación (JINTE)’ at the University of La Laguna (Tenerife, Spain). He is also member of the African Studies Group at the Autonomous University of Madrid (GEA-UAM).
He completed his PhD in Economics (Cum Laude) in March 2024 with a thesis Essays on Fighting against Malaria, Health, and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa supervised by Professor Gustavo Alberto Marrero Díaz and Professor Carlos Gabriel Bethencourt. In his thesis, he constructed and used the Malaria Policy Index (MaPI) to assess the effectiveness of antimalarial policies’ implementation on its prevalence and mortality, and analysed the interrelationship between health and income improvements in Sub-Sahara African countries.
Since May 2024, he has been immersing himself into ethnographic methods applied to migration studies as a Guest Researcher at the University of Graz (Centre for Southeast European Studies-CSEES) in the research project “Elastic Borders: Rethinking the Borders of the 21st Century”, an interdisciplinary research project directed by Prof. Dr. Bilgin Ayata and generously funded by the NOMIS Foundation.
His research lines include development economics and health economics with focus on inequality, poverty, economic growth, global health, malaria policies, and migration. His current research focus on examining the state of art on migration and health focusing on the unelucidated role of health in shaping migration decisions.