In the last five years, immigration enforcement in the United States has changed dramatically. The focus on federal border enforcement and workplace raids of yesteryear has been replaced by an intensification of state and local initiatives that rely on the daily policing of immigrant communities deep within the country's heartlands. Perhaps the most pervasive of these are the 287(g) and Secure Communities programs, which call upon local police and sheriff's offices to act as foot soldiers for the enforcement of federal immigration law. Fortified by the pervasive rollback by states of immigrant access to driver's licenses, these programs convert the mundane act of driving into the activity of highest risk for undocumented individuals. Getting pulled over for a minor traffic violation now typically results in detention and often deportation. Yet most immigrants-as most "Americans"-are compelled to drive on a daily basis in order to work, care for their children, and keep up their households. How do people cope with this reality, where driving is at once requisite and forbidden? Our unfolding research in Atlanta reveals the importance of social networks and new communication technologies, including social media, in immigrants' struggle to maintain a semblance of normalcy amid the intense criminalization of their communities. Through a discussion of the policing of automobility, its resulting immobility, and emerging forms of altermobility, this paper brings into ethnographic relief the recent words of one undocumented activist who declared, "the only secure community is an organized one." [mobilities, immigration enforcement, undocumented immigrant, Atlanta] I n 2009 we decided to move away from the county where we lived because it had Secure Communities. There, we could barely leave the house because of the police presence in the area. But before long, the same thing happened in our new home. They started to put up checkpoints, and soon we were even worse off than before. The checkpoints were a daily occurrence, without a single day of rest.-JuanaWe lived in [a 287(g) county] and I was pulled over one day because I was driving too slowly. My family was with me, and the police officer asked me for my driver's license. I had a license from Tennessee at the time, but he told me I couldn't drive in Georgia. At first I was angry that he had pulled me over for no reason and given me a ticket even bs_bs_banner
Immigration enforcement by sheriffs and police can be characterized as a proliferation of quasi‐events which never quite rise to the status of an event. This poses distinct challenges for feminist‐inspired scholarship on the state which seeks to document, ethnographically, how the state goes about its business on the ground. In this article we draw on our fieldwork experience in North Carolina and Georgia on sheriffs’ and police departments’ use of traffic enforcement and policing roadblocks to scrutinize drivers for their legal status, and ask how our ethnographic approach to the problem of state power inevitably stumbles in relation to the ordinariness of these practices. We conclude that feminist scholarship committed to an ethnography of the state could do much more to think through the potentially aporetic quality of that which is our common object of research—the state in practice.
“When they're done with you,” an impassioned union representative once cautioned me, “they'll crumple you up like a piece of paper, throw you out, and reach back for your kids.” Industrial poultry production is horrific work, reliant upon the expendable bodies of Black and Brown workers, many of whom are immigrants. While anthropologists have increasingly employed the concepts of structural violence and vulnerability to understand the experiences of migrant health, few have focused on the workplace. Over several years, as the coordinator of the Mississippi Poultry Workers' Center's Workplace Injury Project, I documented the lengths to which this industry will go to avoid reporting and treating injuries via the workers' compensation system. From obstructionist plant nurses and company doctors to surveillance, retaliation, and termination, injured undocumented workers' experiences underscore the failings of workers' compensation as a medico‐legal project. Drawing on scholarship from legal and medical anthropology, public health, critical legal studies, and healthcare economics and policy, this article employs the framework of legal violence to scrutinize the ways in which immigration and workers' compensation laws work together to produce layered precarities among injured immigrant poultry workers, considering the role of occupational injury and the repression of injured immigrant workers in reproducing a docile and exploitable labor force for a capitalist economy that places profit over people.
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