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For thousands of Mexican laborers, life along the U.S. border represents an opportunity both to earn wages and to gain access to consumer goods. For anthropologist Josiah Heyman, this labor force presents an opportunity to gain a better understanding of working people, "to uncover the order underlying the history of waged lives." Life and Labor on the Border traces the development of the urban working class in northern Sonora over the period of a century. Drawing on an extensive collection of life histories, Heyman describes what has happened to families over several generations as people have left the countryside to work for American-owned companies in northern Sonora or to cross the border to find other employment. Heyman searches for the origins of "working classness" in these family histories, revealing aspects of life that strengthen people's involvement with a consumer economy, including the role of everyday objects like sewing machines, cars, and stoves. He considers the consequences of changing political and economic tides, as well as the effects on family life of the new role of women in the labor force. Within the broad sweep of family chronicles, key junctures in individual lives—both personal and historical crises—offer additional insights into social class dynamics. These life stories convey the positive sense of people's goals in life and reveal the origins of a distinctive way of life in the borderlands.

In July 2012, a diverse group of US residents living near the US-Mexico border met in El Paso, Texas for a conference entitled, We the Border: Envisioning a Narrative for Our Future. This paper describes their vision for the US-Mexico border that is at odds with the widespread view of the border as a threat to the United States. These border residents viewed their region as a set of human communities with rights, capacities, and valuable insights and knowledge. They embraced an alternative vision of border enforcement that would focus on "quality" (dangerous entrants and contraband) over "quantity" (mass migration enforcement). They called for investments in the functionality and security of ports of entry, rather than in between ports of entry. They noted the low crime rate in US border cities, and examined how policies of not mixing local law enforcement with federal immigration enforcement contributed to this achievement. They saw the border region as the key transportation and brokerage zone of the emerging, integrated North American economy. In their view, the bilingual, bicultural, and binational skills that characterize border residents form part of a wider border culture that embraces diversity and engenders creativity. Under this vision the border region is not an empty enforcement zone, but is part of the national community and its residents should enjoy the same constitutional and human rights as other US residents. The conference participants emphasized the necessity and value of accountability and oversight of central government enforcement operations, and the need for border communities to participate in federal decision-making that affects their lives.

RésuméLa discrétion exercée par les agents de première ligne des services frontaliers représente un élément fondamental dans l'étude de la façon que les états-nations traitent les populations mobiles aux frontières internationales et près de celles-ci. Cette discrétion implique non seulement des décisions sur les moments d'agir, instants réactionnaires marqués par des circonstances, des personnes ou des motifs légaux particuliers, mais aussi des décisions sur les moments de nepasagir. Une étude des inactions complète l'ensemble des informations nécessaires afin de délimiter l'inégalité du triage social par l'État. Cette inégalité est soulignée dans l'analyse des documents frontaliers à l'aide d'une perspective novatrice: l'auteur examine les raisons pourquoi, dans un tel contexte, certains frontaliers inspirent confiance tandis que d'autres sont considérés comme des risques potentiels. L'allocation de la confiance et du risque est des plus intéressantes et complexes, révélant plusieurs processus majeurs opérant simultanément, à savoir les inégalités de classe et de race ainsi que la promulgation territoriale de l'État-nation.

In a powerful passage, Foucault explores differential illegalities at the moment of punishment and their role in social process. I seek to extend this key idea to the differentiation of detection and arrest versus non-detection and non-arrest. I do this by conceptualizing a profoundly unequal continuum, with some social actors viewed as 'risks' and thus subject to continual attempts at detection (and thus facing the risk of arrest), and other social actors viewed as 'trustworthy' and therefore mostly to entirely excused from police examination (and thus largely removed from the chance of being arrested for something). The differentiation of trust and risk positions vis-a-vis the law matters significantly to quotidian experiences, subjectivities, social representations, and collective social relations. My empirical ground is various inspections checkpoints and inspectorial encounters in the heavily policed borderlands of the United States at and near its boundary with Mexico. Adapted from the source document.

High‐scale morality is the study of moral ideas and sentiments deployed in relations that encompass multiple, geographically or socially distant populaces. The envisioning of distant people, their attributed moral personhood, the evaluation of their perceived behaviour, and the rectification of wrongs through the use of powerful organizations are key topics in high‐scale morality. High‐scale morality differs from existing anthropological approaches that emphasize local ethnography or contrastive moral ideas; it addresses the moralization of issues like world hunger, the drug trade, or international migration. The officers of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service understand and evaluate legal and illegal immigrants, as well as directly enacting moral rectification for the US polity. As they resolve moral dilemmas on their job, they utilize pervasive models for moral thought and action in capitalist, individualist, stratified, and bureaucratized societies. The article finishes by considering directions in which anthropology can contribute to understanding the moral dimension of global issues.