RISULTATI RICERCA

Since the late 1980s we can observe that international migration is an issue of rising importance both at the foreign and the domestic policy agenda of most industrialised nations. In a growing number of European countries migration has a bigger impact on population size and structure than the balance of births and deaths. During the beginning of the 90s the inflow of asylum seekers, labour migrants and family members was growing fast. The geographical structure and the temporal dynamics of the immigration to the EU are the central focus of this paper.

The UK is the European country with the highest number of applications for asylum. Notwithstanding the efforts made by government to amend and restrict eligibility criteria of admission, both to avoid abuse and to reduce the number of new admissions, figures have increased steadily since 1999. The level of benefits and support is all but pleasant. Housing has been restricted and they can’t work to improve their material conditions. Beside, although entitled to a full and free access to the NHS, managerial, linguistic and cultural barriers make difficult to meet their more elementary needs. There is general concern that measures implemented in the last few years by the government will leave many in need without minimal essential coverage. This may be a serious threat for their health but also, indirectly, for the communities they live in.

This essay focuses on the subjective perception and the behaviours connected with health in familiar contests. It considers immigrants as active subjects who perceive and manage their own health. Studying immigrant families’ health we realised that they still are a social group at risk, particularly exposed to insecurity and social exclusion. To study immigrants’ families starting from their family life means a special concern on the intersection between public and private life, and between macro and micro structure. Starting from the reconstruction of a general theory, the author analyses the material collected during her Austrian studies.

Foreign immigration in Italy is becoming a phenomenon more and more related to families, instead of being related to individuals as in the past. In Italy, immigrants are no more individual workers: they increasingly get married, they have children and they are often reached by their families coming from their native countries. In time, their health needs chanced. This should have produced changes in our National Health Care System, but it did not. It is necessary, for the future, to implement health care policies more aware of the weakest ranges of population, particularly more focused to families living in difficult socioeconomic and cultural conditions.

The article analyses the new problems coming out in the health care system, for Pasini a particular sector of social policies. These health problems concerns not only the western citizens, but also the immigrants who decided to live in these countries. Pasini focuses his attention on the large request of goods and services, that represents a big challenge for the present economic and social situation, with limited resources and necessity to change its redistributive criteria. Automatically, the debate leads to a reflection about the health policies aims. In multi-ethnic and multicultural societies the conception of health and illness becomes more and more pluralistic and relativistic, causing difficult problems of trans-cultural bioethic. As a consequence, the concepts of need and right change their meanings and this imposes a ri-definition of the concept of citizenship, strictly connected with welfare.

New Immigrations and Problems of Strategy in the European Health Care Systems: An Introduction (di Tullio Seppilli) -ABSTRACT: Are european health care systems able to give right answers to the new immigrants’ needs and requests of health?. In order to answer this question, Tullio Seppilli focuses on the characteristics and dynamics sparked off by the new immigrations. He presents three typical different answers to the recent flows of immigration that he considers very dangerous, but he proposes, instead, a policy based on a common public culture, as a realistic strategy to reduce the unavoidable human costs caused by immigration. He underlines, at last, that health answers to the new citizens’ needs are strictly connected with an appropriate attention given to the all population’s needs and requests of health.