Infrastructures of health and border control: Ukrainian refugees seeking healthcare in Poland

This paper draws on a larger project which considers the position of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers as subjects with health needs, entangled on the one hand in systems of border control and enforcement, and on the other seeking and accessing care within national (public) health systems in Europe. Taking as an entry point the recent (2022) mass reception in Poland of Ukrainians fleeing the full-scale Russian invasion, this paper draws attention to the infrastructural aspects of healthcare and border control, showing how they have come to intersect. It argues that these intersections reflect a politics of bordering which asserts the primacy of border control over migrants’ and refugees’ other entitlements. However, in the case of Polish reception of refugees from Ukraine in early 2022, the government was prepared to make relatively far-reaching legislative changes to facilitate the accommodation of Ukrainian citizens, including ensuring their access to state-funded healthcare. Based on an analysis of Polish healthcare data and stakeholder interviews, this research asks what happens when the rare political will does exist to accommodate a refugee group. In spite of a widespread perception that granting equal access to public healthcare to Ukrainians had been a successful policy, the healthcare system has proved difficult to navigate and, in some ways, exclusionary. The paper argues that this is in part because the existing infrastructures of healthcare and border control are enmeshed in ways that are difficult to disentangle. Ultimately, through an analysis of the Poland’s population registration tool, the PESEL number and its allocation to Ukrainian refugees, the paper highlights the mechanisms that render healthcare access for refugees conditional and uneven.