ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces some of the key issues concerning disability and migration. It considers disabled migrants’ experiences of realising their social, economic and cultural rights through access and navigation of services and the disabling barriers they encounter. The pathologising of disability remains a central discourse within immigration policy, with the fusion of health and disability and related arguments about cost/burden being utilised as a means by which to deny entry to particular bodies. Despite the implementation of equality legislation in Canada, excluding a person on the basis of disability and the cost of medical care is acceptable under the 2001 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Discourses of ‘burden’, ‘lack’ and the conflation of health and disability are present within administrative systems which rely predominantly on biomedical approaches to disability. Intersectionality theory offers one way to engage with complexities of disability and migration, providing a means to include disability as a core issue within migration studies.
