I didn’t really follow the Jesica Santillan case very closely, and missed an interesting fact about Santillan — she was apparently in the United States illegally. According to a number of reports, her mother smuggled her into the country hoping that she would receive better care in the United States than in Mexico.
Doing a Google search on Santillan turns up a number of opinions on this state of affairs. There’s the hardcore anti-immigrant folks who think Santillan’s case is a tragedy because it will just encourage more people from Mexico to take the often dangerous step of illegally crossing the border. There’s also plenty of sentiment that it doesn’t matter — here’s a young woman who needed a transplant, and her nationality be damned.
Of course Santillan is a very sympathetic figure. In the 1980s, there was less sympathy for a number of wealthy foreign nationals — including the wife of a prominent Saudi Arabian diplomat — who came to the United States for organ transplants.
In response United Network for Organ Sharing decreed that transplant centers must limit to 5 percent the number of transplants they do for foreign nationals. In 2002, 936 of the 22,709 organ transplants operations in the United States were performed on foreign nationals.
One of the major problems with this system us that UNOS appears to have no serious guidelines for deciding when an organ should go to a foreign national over a U.S. citizen. The American Society of Transplant Surgeons proposed giving U.S. citizens first shot at any organs, with foreign nationals qualifying only if there were no citizens who could take the organ (and, to be fair, something like that appears to have happened in the Santillan case), but UNOS appears to have never formally adopted that guideline, leaving such decisions up to whatever policies transplant centers themselves want to formulate.
Sources:
Immigration, organ issues mix: Medical community faces quandary of who is most deserving recipient. Scott Dodd, Charlotte Observer, February 21, 2003.