when speaking about immigrant patients. He mentions, inter alia, immigrants as a burden,
immigrants with a lower cultural background, immigrants as patients who stink,
immigrants as uncooperative or dangerous patients.
When a new police officer at one of the detention centres in Athens came to inform the
doctor employed by the NGO that a lot of women were reporting feeling pain, he replied
‘It doesn’t matter. That’s what they do. You are new here, you’ll see. They are in prison and they want to
rest…I don’t understand them. They have all the free time in the world’ (participant observation,
2012). Similarly, he thought that they all lie and complain all the time for no reason. The
same doctor told me that he was building a house. He went on adding ‘Do you think I am
going to employ immigrant builders? Of course not. I’m going to choose Greeks over them. They have to go
back’ (participant observation, 2012). Despite his racist tirades, he remained one of the
most trusted employees of the organisation, reinforcing the idea of humanitarianism as
white supremacy (Pallister-Wilkins, 2021).
Doctors in other facilities were even more overt, blaming the migrants themselves for their
bad health, oblivious of the conditions that contributed to this in the first place. The
doctor, who had been appointed in Amygdaleza when the centre opened, was a young
woman, who had just started working as a trainee in a public hospital but needed extra
cash. She did nothing to hide her disgust towards detainees. ‘They are not normal, they stink,
they don’t wash themselves’ (notes, 2012), she would emphatically say when complaining about
the migrants’ bad odour. ‘Go have a shower’ was her cure to every complaint the migrants
had about their health. Unsurprisingly she got along well with detention officers. At the
end of her shift one day, she was fooling around with the officers, making fun of the
detainees who repeatedly asked for more toothbrushes.115 ‘You know what they say about
Pakistani guys, heh? What do they want all these toothbrushes for? They obviously use them for sexual
stimulation.’ (Diary, 2012). They all laughed in agreement.
While an analysis of dynamics of medical and carceral power would warrant further
attention and is beyond the scope of this PhD project, the discussion above, illuminates
the confluence of public health and immigration systems and their complicity in the
reproduction of punishable and detainable objects (Fischer, 2013). In doing so, it draws
115
The NGO was distributing NFI items.
171
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