Arizona law S.B. 1070, as amended by H.B. 2162 (S.B. 1070 henceforth), presents applied social scientists, and the publics with which they are connected, with several important issues. The core issue is that unauthorized mi-grants, and the communities that include them (which are often heavily Latino, but also African, Caribbean, and Asian) will be subject to intensified surveillance by state and local police, and criminal arrest, detention, and penal-ty as consequences. Interior policing as opposed to border policing of immigrants and deportation of unauthorized people by the federal government has roughly qua-drupled in the last half-decade. Such deportations are dis-ruptive of families and communities, and should be a con-cern of applied social scientists even when done by the federal government. But S.B. 1070 expands this concern to the much more pervasive interaction between state and local police and immigrant-heavy communities. It constitutes a key emergence point in the diffusion of a state and local enforcement approach to immigration re-striction, previously approached mainly as a federal issue.

S.B. 1070 also raises the issue of the overlap in the U.S. imagination and in policing practice between Latino iden-tity, phenotypes, and “illegalness,” even when unjustified by actual citizenship and immigration status. It signals the continuing importance of addressing migration issues, in the face of delays in passing federal comprehensive immi-gration reform legislation and the hidden issue of human and civil rights in border and immigration enforcement. At the same time, it is inappropriate to use the national fail-ure to pass comprehensive immigration reform to excuse Arizona for the sorts of laws it passes and actions in some cases it tolerates. Finally, anxieties about the U.S.-Mexico border, realistic and imaginary, substantially motivated the passage of S.B. 1070, point toward the need for en-gagement with border issues.