Illegality at Work: Deportability and the Productive New Era of Immigration Enforcement

Abstract: Our goal in this paper is to identify how recent escalations in immigration enforcement and changes in migration practices affect the ability of the state to continue to serve two of its key “productive” functions: protecting capital accumulation within industry and ensuring the state's own political legitimacy in the eyes of the public. We draw on our ethnographic research on Latino migrant dairy farm workers in Wisconsin to examine the ways in which a group of migrant workers experiences the process of being enforced as “illegal” bodies. We find that migrant dairy workers’ palpable sense of “deportability” articulates with the specific structure of dairy work in ways that make the economically and politically “ideal” migrant: compliant at work and invisible otherwise.     

Cash Transfers and the Well‐being of Older People in Brazil

This article provides a comprehensive assessment of the effects of social protection interventions on material and subjective elements of well‐being. Drawing on a longitudinal survey located in two relatively deprived parts of Brazil, it assesses the effects of pensions and other cash transfers on the well‐being of older people and their households. This analysis is located within a dynamic economic and public policy context. The article finds that pension benefits significantly increase per capita income and that this is strongly associated with overall levels of satisfaction with household well‐being. Levels of reported subjective well‐being do not fall as respondents age, and the survey finds high levels of optimism about future well‐being. The positive effects of pension benefits were supported by upgraded health services and by more specific policies such as access to credit on favourable terms. Overall, the authors conclude that a combination of economic growth and effective public policies significantly boosted the well‐being of most households in their survey, and that Brazil can be taken as a model of good practice for other middle‐income countries.     

Jack of Two Trades,Master of Both: Smelting and Healing in Ufipa,Southwestern Tanzania

Pre-colonial African ironworking was much more than just a technology; it encompassed economic, social, political, symbolic, and even healing components. It is only unfortunate that archaeometallurgical research has not availed equal weight to each aspect, hence the apparent obscurity of some of them. Revealing the multiple facets of healing as manifested in ironworking technology, this paper attempts to rectify this imbalance. Essentially, the paper examines pros and cons of combining ironworking with healing of humans, a phenomenon common among ironworking communities in pre-colonial Africa. It is revealed that by combining the two, iron smelters ensured themselves of gains beyond technology and economy; they also became socially and politically influential. In addition, the paper notes that there existed a very close connection between healing and ritualism not only among smelter–healers but also conventional healers. After a thorough examination, it is found that the connection between the two was also pragmatic and deliberately instituted by the practitioners in order to enhance monopoly of their trade and protect their inventions against interlopers.     

The Language of Historical Education

James F. Voss and Mario Carretero, (eds.) Learning and Reasoning in History. International Review of History Education