ABSTRACT
Migration is one of the defining issues of the twenty-first century. A globalised world has fostered mobile populations, whose members respond to a range of push and pull factors in their decisions to leave their countries of origin. Within migration studies, some have argued that migration in the twenty-first century is defined by ‘superdiversity’ (Vertovec 2007). While migration studies has given little attention to disability, disability studies scholars have considered the lives and experiences of disabled migrants across the globe. This chapter will introduce some of the key issues concerning disability and migration. The chapter focuses predominantly on research in the global north and international migration. In doing so, it offers a partial view of migration, an issue returned to in the conclusion. The chapter does not focus explicitly on a particular impairment group. Many migrants may experience mental distress as a result of the migration process and their lives as migrants, an issue which has been given greater attention in health research than various other impairments (Abubakar et al. 2018). Throughout the chapter, two issues familiar to disability studies arise within the context of migration: the dominance of the biomedical model and resulting conflation of health and disability within administrative systems; and the construction of disabled people as a burden on society.
