New Zealand Doctors to Fat Immigrants: Stay Out
In a stunning display of discrimination, doctors in New Zealand are promoting the idea of screening immigrants for their weight and smoking habits. The reason? Lots of unhealthy people are putting a burden on the healthcare system there and since a lot of people there are also fat, they're getting a bad rep.
Dr [Andy]Veale said while immigrants were screened for tuberculosis, their body mass index (BMI), which could indicate obesity, was not checked.
If New Zealand let in people who were obese, this needed to be acknowledged in health funding, he said.
Here's where it starts, folks: excluding people from entire countries due to their BMI. What a ridiculous and sad idea. [Thank you, Victor!]
Anti-Fat Sentiment in Animal Rights | Fat Helps in a Heart Attack, But Don't Be Fat
Posted by paul on July 3, 2007
If they screen by BMI, they're going to shut out a lot of healthy, productive people.
I mean, if New Zealand wants to discriminate according to health status they could... you know, not accept immigrants with actual diseases. Heart disease. Lung cancer. That sort of thing. Just a wild and crazy idea.
Stories like this should serve to make fat people wake up about the direction and momentum of anti-fat hatred in the world today. More and more, fat people are being regarded not just as unhealthy or ugly but also as social undesirables and bad citizens. The existence of fat people in any significant numbers is beginning to be seen as a political problem.
This should terrify anyone who has even the slightest acquaintance with the history of discrimination and oppression. Whenever the question, "What should we do about [insert name of identifiable group]?" starts getting asked with serious intent, the answer almost never turns out to be "live and let live."
I have several NZ friends who say that the job market is getting really tight. Two of them who work in healthcare have actually gone to Oz to get jobs. They may be trying to keep out immigrants in general, but be using fatphobia to justify where they are drawing the line.
I'm not saying that's a good thing, just that it might not be as straightforward as it appears on the surface.
Australia already has such a rule in place. If you want to get a residency visa, too bad if you've a BMI over 30 and have a "co-morbidity" such as any disease associated with (associated, not necessarily caused or aggravated by) being fat. Whether you only have slightly-raised blood pressure, or you've already had three heart attacks, it's all the same. Too fat, fatty. Even if your BMI is over 30 because you're a muscular type. Still too fat!
I think you may be able to get a work visa (which only last 1-2 years), but I could be wrong.
I find this appalling. Even nanny-state Britain seems to let in the fat immigrants, their health checks seem to be concerned mainly with tuberculosis, an actual health problem. I wonder what happens to fat refugees once their temporary asylum visas expire and they apply for residency. Get sent back to your strife-torn homeland or to the detention centre, I presume.
I cannot believe that doctors, of all people, consider BMI a measurement of health. It's not. It is a holdover of the social darwinism of Victorian times (see Eric Oliver) and does not--repeat, does not--measure health. As the term implies, it simply measures mass. What is a "healthy" mass keeps undergoing revision, to the liking of insurance companies, government nannies, researchers whose bread and butter lies in keeping obesity an "epidemic," and other fraidy cats.
So, will NZ turn away thin people who have, say, arthritis, or high blood pressure? Now we're working up to an age discrimination situation, too. I don't think I know anyone over the age of 50 who doesn't have a chronic and potentially expensive health condition. Isn't this more or less what the Nazis did--sort out the lame and halt, the aged, anyone who looked ill or weak or just too odd (homosexuals, little people, etc) and take them straight to the gas chambers? I feel strange invoking this nightmare in our context. On the other hand, most people didn't want to believe it was coming then, either.
Hey, I've got a great idea! Let's make up an official-sounding name, say, International Medical Associates, and try telling the truth. If any old doctor (or author of anything) can get behind a microphone and say that obesity is a disease that's threatening our nation's health, or other such mumbo jumbo, then why can't we say what needs to be said--and get heard?
I don't mean to stray from the topic, but I support that general idea, goddess. At the very least, maybe each of us could come up with an important sounding name, like fat-hating MeMe Roth did, and present ourselves to the media as quotable experts, also like Roth did.
It's amazing how easy it is to appear to be an expert. A person's having gone to med school seems to be enough for most people to accept the utter authority of what might be his/her unfounded remark. I've seen it enough times, not only in the press, but also in exam rooms. Okay, rebelle, I'll work on my authority figure persona and costume. And then call a press conference. You, too!
I agree with Goddess that screening immigrants on BMI (or some other proxy for fat) is the slippery slope to genocide. We know that fat hatred is first and foremost a form of social discrimination, and it has been rare in my 55 years to find a physician who could separate her or his bias about fat from any real health-related concern. Many if not most clearly let their bias rule their interactions and diagnoses and even the withholding of needed treatment. History shows us over and over again how stigmatized groups of people are treated. We have only to read the international news to see modern day examples of genocide in Africa and the Middle East. Can it happen to fat people if we are silent? Yes.
Why not go straight to genetic testing for potential predisposition for disease?
It'll take a bit longer for immigrants to cross the border, but dang, New Zealand could have the healthiest immigrants evah!
Definitely looking like the slippery slope to genocide as mentioned above.
Why not throw all fat people into concentration camps? Crap like this scares the hell out of me. All I picture is a new form of Hitler and Nazi Germany. Teaching a country to hate a specific group is exactly what Hitler and friends did.
It's scary, Icecat, but really worth spreading the word about. I'm not usually paranoid or horribly cynical about things, but the evidence is building. Hitler had lots of political and economic reasons for targeting groups to be the bad guys, and he had his own ambitions to think about. I don't see a political faction that wants to rise to ultimate power gathering under the banner in this country--but maybe I'm just ill informed. Seems more like an international swell, coming from the beginnings of coalitions of medical professionals, federal and state governments, educational administrations, fat cats in the diet industry, and individuals.
I suppose each country will decide what it wants to do about The Fat Problem. And possibly throw in a few other groups along with us. Too bad those in power don't realize they might have to attack their own ancestors. Too bad they don't realize that, if left alone, so many fat people will outlive their skinny counterparts. Anyway, I think our best strategies must lie in organizing sympathetic people against this burgeoning trend, get our voices heard in the mass media, and all while remaining as calm as possible. It probably won't help to scream genocide; we'll just be labeled as a crazy fringe element.
Nazis? Hitler? Genocide?! Can we get a freakin' sense of proportion here?
Two -- count 'em, two! -- doctors in New Zealand suggested that it might be a good idea to screen people's BMI before letting them into the country, on the grounds that fat people are at greater risk for certain diseases. The vast majority of medical professionals believe that to be true -- in fact, the number of doctors who don't believe fatness causes or contributes to disease is probably so small as to be statistically nonexistent. (And I don't even know for sure that they're wrong. Where I differ from the medical profession is in the idea that the way to address the increased health risks of fatness is by trying to turn fat people into thin people, which has about the same likelihood of success as trying to turn short people into tall people. But I digress.)
And these two doctors do not, at least in this article, actually even suggest that fat immigrants be prohibited from entering the country. Rather, they ask that if New Zealand admits fat people, the increased cost be "acknowledged in health funding" for their area. Which may be based on an unexamined assumption about health-care costs for fat people, but is hardly irrational.
And then we find out that the two doctors are, in fact, mistaken, and New Zealand is already screening immigrants for obesity and has been for a couple of years: "Immigration Minister David Cunliffe told the newspaper processes were tightened in 2005 to provide more comprehensive health screening. This was done by medical professionals and obesity and smoking were both canvassed."
Finally, although fatness is apparently considered a health "risk factor" -- the article is not 100% clear on the point -- it is not, in and of itself, causing people to be excluded from immigrating to New Zealand.
One of the most irritating things about activism -- on any issue -- is the tendency of activists to dive off rhetorical cliffs. I am a 250-pound woman in Los Angeles, so I have a pretty good idea of how badly fat people are treated. But please. Get a grip. "Slippery slope," my (fat) ass.
Here's my sense of proportion: just like in the US, this article suggests that BMI is being used as a proxy to discriminate against specific populations who otherwise have been written in to exisiting civil rights legislation. In the case of New Zealand, the article suggests that this country is interested in keeping out an ethnicity, Samoans and other native Pacific Islanders. In the US, so much of the 'obesity epidemic' rhetoric is used to regulate specific racial and/or ethnic populations that historically have been the object of genocidal-type behavior, or does the Middle Passage and the slaughters of the Conquistadors not count as genocide?
Accoding to the most recent figures from the US government, adult African-American Women and adult Mexican-American men lead the way in rates of fatness. Samoa has the largest percentage of fat people of any country in the world, including the United States. So I think it is wise to look at how the experiences of other colonized peoples may be influencing current governmental policies on 'obesity,' and not to get complacent when '2 doctors' call for BMI to be used as a measuring stick for whether someone is allowed to emmigrate or not. In the end, discrimination is discrimination, and since BMI is such a handy tool to reconfigure to exclude whoever you want (otherwise, the BMI rates for 'overweight' and 'obesity' would not have been made tighter a decade ago), I'd pay close attention to any suggestion of linking citizenship (and the rights conferred upon those with citizenship) to BMI.
Good point jlm. I am really fascinated with the Samoan people. Do you or someone else know enough about them to start a new topic? I don't think they eat McDonald's... could they be - gasp! - naturally fat?
Catrandom, while I agree that it's not useful to "dive off rhetorical cliffs," I nevertheless maintain my great concern over what seems to be a growing trend of restricting fat people's rights and customary civil and social privileges. I was not speaking above about the New Zealand situation but about the cumulative evidence of the rise of this trend on an international level.
I believe that, unfortunately, it is the fat prejudiced who are the most effective activists these days; their rhetoric includes scare tactics associated with categorizing fatter people as unhealthy, expensive medical risks and just plain bad people, who disregard the tenets of healthy living, self-respect, and good parenting. People and institutions with real clout are determining or attempting to determine whether fatter people are entitled to live as others do. Does this sound anything like historical phenomena of targeting ethnic, racial, or differently abled groups? Have any of these targetings led to increasingly extreme methods? Have some of these targeted groups, with sympathetic allies, acted on their own behalf and turned things around?
I ask only that we keep a sharp eye out and that we not delude ourselves into thinking that if we just wait, we'll wake up one day and the nightmare will be over.
Notice how "fat" and "smoking" are categorized together, while smoking is a behavior and fat is a state of being. The people who are demonizing fat always talk about it as if the condition of fatness is interchangeable with overeating, a sedentary lifestyle, and array of medical conditions including diabetes. In challenging these people, it's helpful to ask: what exactly is it about my fatness (or fatness itself) which is threatening to you? What do you believe you know about me based on my body size?
These doctors don't have a problem with fat per se, they have a problem with the associated medical conditions.
Not that that's any better, I don't think even they are clear on exactly what their position is.
Jennifer Portnick
Personal Trainer (who is fat)
San Francisco, CA
"These doctors don't have a problem with fat per se, they have a problem with the associated medical conditions. "
I disagree. In my experience, even if all your bloodwork and your blood pressure is within a healthy range and you have no other condition or symptom, doctors will still tell you that being fat is a problem per se. Also, I have reasons to think the same experience apply to other fat people.
In my opinion, it is wise to pay attention to such warning bells as the one that the opinion of those doctors set off.
There's a slippery slope that makes defining "actual diseases" and "medical conditions" rather ominous as well; folks must be careful about drawing that line based on what they think are reasonable conditions to screen out. New Zealand's discrimination extends to a whole lot of different kinds of people who deviate from the standard, and whose very *being* is considered pathological. And when people start killing their kids over it, I am thoroughly creeped out : http://www.raggededgemagazine.com/departments/closerlook/000577.html