When Systems of Oppression Intersect: Mental Health and the Immigration System
“She did not deliver in a hospital, and she almost died,” said the younger sister, Yu, 33, the first to emigrate. A few days after the birth, she added, officials found Jiang, sterilized her and imposed a heavy fine. Later, divorced and desperate, Jiang borrowed the equivalent of $35,000 to be smuggled by boat to the United States, hoping to find political asylum and bring over the young sons she left with their grandmother.
But grueling months at sea left her emotionally fragile, and in the summer of 1997, about a year after her arrival, she became so despondent about her separation from her children, and the burden of her debts, that she tried to kill herself by drinking bleach, her sisters said. The police took her to Bellevue Hospital Center.
“She was afraid of being arrested, so the next day she ran away,” Yu recalled. At times over the next decade Jiang seemed better, as she moved from work in Manhattan garment factories to waitress jobs in Chinese restaurants across the country. But an effort to bring her younger son into the United States through Canada when he was 8 or 9 backfired: he was caught by Canadian officials and placed in foster care.
“He intended to join up with her,” the younger sister said of the boy, now 16. “Now it’s impossible, because he’s being adopted.”
It is impossible to disentangle the different strands of prejudice; where the psychiatric system is used to persecute people of colour, the justice system or immigration system persecutes people with disabilities, and inhumane systems in general combine to drive people to madness — or as in the case of Jiang and Junius Wilson, a combo of all of those things.
In 1932 Junius Wilson (pictured right), a 24 year-old deaf black man in North Carolina was castrated and imprisoned in the state hospital after being found guilty of rape. In 1990s, when Wilson was in his 80′s, after 65 years he was cleared of charges and released. He did not actually leave the hospital though – after all that time it had become his home.
It is not a coincidence that both Jiang’s and Wilson’s story involves the brutal violation of reproductive rights; the role forced sterilisation has played in the dehumanisation of both people of colour and people with disabilities is nauseating. You can go here, here and here to read about how the forced sterilisation of indigenous people has been used to colonise the land we live on, and you can go here to look at how contemporary birth control programs are used to try and restrict the reproductive choices of young indigenous women.
Our history is rife with examples like Jiang and Wilson; but for the most part people are forgotten in a system where it may be easier to keep someone institutionalised, rather than probe the massive bureaucracy and prejudice that keeps them there.
The original articles I have linked use the term “mentally ill” to refer to Jiang; I choose not to use that language. As with Wilson, in Jiang’s case it seems more important to recognise that it is the illness within our system that creates the real tragedy, not Jiang’s condition itself. A huge part of ability rights activism (which, as is painfully clear in both Jiang and Wilson’s case, has innumerable links with anti-racist activism) is recognising that the problem is the system, not the person with the disability; it is not our bodies that are the problem, but how we culturally define health, and how we treat people who don’t fit with that definition. In the words of Jiang’s sisters who have been fighting to Jiang’s deportation order overturned:
The exact nature of Jiang’s illness is unknown, and immigration authorities would not release her medical records, even to her lawyers, saying she had refused to sign a privacy release. Her two sisters, who live in New York, describe her as a sweet, quiet woman whose mind broke under the strain of life as an illegal immigrant seeking asylum.
When it is clear that the catalyst to madness lies just as much within the systems we have in place to deal with bodies as it does within the bodies themselves, terming something simply a “mental illness” and placing the onus only on the body just doesn’t seem to cut it.
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