Research
Unprecedented human migration during the long twentieth century has fundamentally reconfigured the globe. Contradictory forces—nativist efforts to preserve closed nation-states and capital’s push for unrestricted movement—have produced new patterns of mobility and exchange. My research examines how these competing pressures shape individuals, communities, and the body politic, with particular attention to their impact on U.S. medicine and the emergence of new global geographies of care.
The Care of Foreigners
For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting immigrant physicians trained at the expense of other countries.
The Care of Foreigners examines this migratory dynamic that began during the Cold War.​The passage of the Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 expedited the entry of foreign medical graduates (FMGs) from postcolonial Asian nations and sent them to provide care in shortage areas throughout the United States. Although this arrangement was conceived as temporary, over the decades it has become a permanent fixture of the medical system, with immigrant physicians comprising at least a quarter of the physician labor force since the act became law. This book foregrounds the global dynamics embedded in the medical system to ask how and why Asian physicians—and especially practitioners from South Asia—have become integral to US medical practice and ubiquitous in the US public imagination.​
Drawing on a range of sources, The Care of Foreigners analyzes both the care provided by immigrant physicians as well as the care extended to them as foreigners in the United States.
I have long wished for a book that comprehensively explored the history, the political machinations, and the personal experiences of foreign-trained physicians like me. The Care of Foreigners is that book. Alam's writing is clear, her research thorough, and her conclusions deeply insightful.
Abraham Verghese, MD, Stanford School of Medicine, author of Cutting for Stone
The Care of Foreigners is a book that finds the world in the proverbial speck of sand. The world is postcolonial and the speck of sand, US healthcare. Tragically, the sand was also wedged in the eye of US racial commonsense that scourged the careers of immigrant physicians. Alam's book is an accessible and ringing indictment of how cash-strapped postcolonial nations have subsidized the coloniality of US healthcare based as it is on the racialized extraction and subordinated use of medical skill.
Projit Bihari Mukharji, , author of Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920-66
In this remarkable book, Eram Alam makes clear that the history of US healthcare can't be told apart from the history of immigration. By centering the experiences of immigrant physicians, The Care of Foreigners reveals how government policy, global politics, and local inequality have long converged to shape who provides care in America—and for whom. Meticulously researched and powerfully argued, it fills a striking gap in both postcolonial immigration history and the history of medicine, opening an urgent conversation about the future of US healthcare.
Dorothy E. Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
We've needed a book like this for a long time, and it has been worth the wait! Brilliantly researched and beautifully written, The Care of Foreigners is a major contribution to the histories of migration and medicine.
Erika Lee, Harvard University, author of The Making of Asian America: A History
Ordering the Human: The Global Spread of Racial Science
Modern science and ideas of race have long been entangled, sharing notions of order, classification, and hierarchy. Ordering the Human presents cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship that examines the racialization of science in various global contexts, illuminating how racial logics have been deployed to classify, marginalize, and oppress.
These wide-ranging essays—written by experts in genetics, forensics, public health, history, sociology, and anthropology—investigate the influence of racial concepts in scientific knowledge production across regions and eras. Chapters excavate the mechanisms by which racialized science serves projects of power and domination, and they explore different forms of resistance. Topics range from skull collecting by eighteenth-century German and Dutch scientists to the use of biology to reinforce notions of purity in present-day South Korea and Brazil. The authors investigate the colonial legacies of the pathologization of weight for the Maori people, the scientific presumption of coronary artery disease risk among South Asians, and the role of racial categories in COVID-19 statistics and responses, among many other cases. Tracing the pernicious consequences of the racialization of science, Ordering the Human shines a light on how the naturalization of racial categories continues to shape health and inequality today.
Ordering the Human is a remarkable gathering of essays that are at once individually compelling and collectively vital. This urgent, wide-ranging book highlights how racism intersects with science and medicine worldwide to shape our understandings of a wide range of contemporary health issues, to the detriment of us all. This excellent book is required reading for all students, practitioners, and people who desire a more healthy, equitable world
Jonathan M. Metzl, author of Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland
This scholarship exposes the enduring allure of racial categorizing and the equally enduring appeal of grounding such categories in science. While the continued thriving of race science may be discouraging, the health of scholarship about it is inspiring
Simon A. Cole, University of California, Irvine, Metascience
This remarkable collection of intellectually and geographically expansive essays makes an essential contribution to our understanding of contradictory ideas of human difference across space and time. Ordering the Human should be read by anyone seeking to make sense of the global entanglements of racialization in science and technology and their practical effects on research, clinical practice, and everyday life
Alondra Nelson, Institute for Advanced Study and author of The Social Life of DNA
It is easy for scholars to argue that “race” is a specific kind of concept located largely in Western science and medicine. The theoretically rich and broad geographical scope of this book brilliantly dispels such views. This is an indispensable contribution to our knowledge of the global reach of race concepts in modern biomedicine and science.
Evelynn M. Hammonds, coeditor of The Nature of Difference: Sciences of Race in the United States from Jefferson to Genomics
Other Publications
“Introduction,” in Ordering the Human: Global Science and Racial Reason, edited by Eram Alam, Dorothy Roberts, Natalie Shibley (New York: Columbia University Press, May 2024).
“Citing the Unsaid,” Special Issue: Dilemmas in Archival Objectivity, Historical Studies of the Natural Sciences 53 no. 1 (February 2024): 73–75.
“Documenting Difference: Standardizing Foreign Physicians,” American Quarterly 75 no. 1 (March 2023): 129-151.
(with Eric Reinhart), “The Neocoloniality of Who Cares: US Underinvestment in Medical Education Exacerbates Global Inequities,” The British Medical Journal, 371 (November 2020): m4293.
“Cold War Crises: Foreign Medical Graduates Respond to US Doctor Shortages, 1965-1975,” Social History of Medicine 33 n.1 (March 2020): 132-151.