Expanding Vulnerability: Health Care, Well-Being, and Arizona’s Immigration Policies – Julie Armin & Robin Reineke

Julie Armin & Robin Reineke
University of Arizona

Arizona has seen a systematic attack on immigrants over the past year.  Several anti-immigrant measures have passed through the legislature in recent months, and more are in the planning stages. Through the everyday enforcement of these policies, the borders of the United States are re-inscribed on bodies and within communities, creating “legal” and “illegal” categories of people who have differential access to state resources and services. Nicholas De Genova argues that ‘illegality’ “is an erasure of legal personhood” that is designed not to physically exclude individuals, but “to socially include them under imposed conditions of enforced and protracted vulnerability.”[1] These constructed categories can expand, compromising the well-being of those who seem to fall outside their initial reach, as friends, co-workers, teachers, doctors, and community members are implicated.

Anticipating the Consequences of Arizona’s SB 1070: A Comparative Perspective from Germany, where Racial Profiling is Business as Usual – Susann Huschke

Susann Huschke
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

In recent weeks I have followed the public debate on Arizona’s new immigration law, and I have been delighted to see that in the United States this kind of law at least provokes public anger and protest as well as political discussion. Will a law that allows police officers to demand documents from anyone (i.e. people whom they suspect, for whatever reason, to be illegal immigrants) lead to racial profiling? According to Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona, no it won’t. Yet empirical evidence from Germany, where a similar law has been in place for over a decade, suggests a different answer: Yes, it will.