Pathogenic Policing: Immigration Enforcement and Health in the US South by NolanKline, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2019. pp. 215.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pathogenic Policing: Immigration Enforcement and Health in the US South is a detailed ethnographic account of undocumented Latinx individuals living in Atlanta, Georgia, in the mid-2010s.Kline describes the various intersectionalities of race, legal status, and gender as they result in differential access to health and well-being in the Latinx community; many of the problems this community faced were created and exacerbated by the immigration enforcement strategies used by the local police force.Kline starts his ethnography with a historical review of immigration policy surrounding the various influxes of (mostly) Mexican immigrants coming to work in the United States in agriculture, construction, and other low-paid service sector industries.He theoretically situates his discussion within the Foucauldian notion of biopower, focusing on power and control over groups of people by categorizing them as "illegal" and therefore as not deserving of basic human needs such as adequate nutrition, safety, and medical care.The fear and trauma that result from the enactment of specific laws, like the oppressive HB 87 which was passed in 2011 in Georgia, resulted in a specific constellation of hurts to undocumented individuals living in that state.The second chapter of the book is an interesting ethnographic look into how protests against HB 87 took place and how the protests were effective in changing some of the most negative aspects of that law.Through an anthropological perspective, we are invited into the world behind the scenes as Kline describes working with grassroots organizations, attending rallies and hearings in the state legislature during its 2013 session.We meet the organizers of these rallies who have years of experience living and working in the United States; some of them have extensive academic backgrounds in Mexico and they all attest to the difficulties of trying to live in Georgia while being targeted by law enforcement officials for such things as traffic stops and other offenses that would normally be considered minor in nature.They are not minor, however, for undocumented people who were at risk for being deported once their immigration status was known to the authorities.This chapter provides a window into the legislative process surrounding HB 87.This political process is tedious and frustrating, and Kline shows what tenacity it took to challenge the system; even to get an interview with some of the lawmakers was impossible.This is an area that warrants more attention by social anthropologists.In chapters 3 and 4, the focus is more quotidian and some of the most telling ramifications of living in this situation are illustrated here.For instance, Kline takes a detailed look at how the mere act of getting behind the wheel without a US driver's license created stress and ill health for the individuals with whom he was working.The fear of being deported was constant.The police had control over any driver as they could pull over a vehicle for many reasons; at that point they could ask for a valid driver's
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.038 | 0.017 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".