Inmigración, salud y sanidad en España en un contexto de pandemia

Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, the importance of protecting the health of migrants has been widely recognised. Ensuring that all immigrants, regardless of their administrative situation, have access to healthcare has been identified as a necessary condition for effectively dealing with the pandemic. Evevn though the right of immigrants to access healthcare has been broadly recognised in Spain since the beginning of the first decade of this century, there have been important fluctuations in the definition and application of that right in the last two decades in the wake of the major social, economic and political disruptions seen in that period. This paper reviews the evolution of the main measures aimed at defining immigrant access to the public healthcare system in Spain, and also analyses the empirical evidence of inequality in access to healthcare that affect immigrant populations in our country.