Driver's Licenses for All? Racialized Illegality and the Implementation of Progressive Immigration Policy in California

Progressive subfederal immigration policy aims to reduce the consequences of illegality for undocumented immigrants. Drawing on interviews with representatives from immigrant‐serving organizations in California, we examine the case of Assembly Bill (A.B.) 60 driver's licenses to assess whether all Californian undocumented immigrants have equal access to a driver's license. Although A.B. 60 was race‐neutral legislation, we argue that its implementation was shaped by racialized migration histories and that it reproduces racialized illegality. Specifically, the deep history of undocumented Mexican migration to California has shaped the institutional capacity of nonprofit and community organizations, foreign consulates, and the Department of Motor Vehicles to advocate for, implement, and serve A.B. 60 applicants. As a result, Spanish‐speaking, Latina/o/x immigrants, particularly those of Mexican origin, experience greater access to A.B. 60 driver's licenses. To combat this, organizations actively worked to reracialize illegality as an issue that also affects non‐Latino populations. Ultimately, we demonstrate that the construction and experience of illegality are deeply tied to race and place.     

Nondecision making and inertia in Portuguese health policy

Despite there having been a positive context for initiating health care reforms in Portugal in the past fifteen years (accompanied by political consensus on the nature of the structural problems within the health care system), there has been a lack of reform initiatives. We use a process-based framework to show how institutional arrangements have influenced Portuguese health care reform. Evidence is presented to demonstrate inertia and nondecision making in three critical areas of Portuguese health policy: clarifying the public-private mix in coverage and provision, creating financial incentives and motivation for human resources, and introducing changes in the pharmaceutical market. Several factors seem to explain these processes, namely, problems in the balance of power within the political system, which have contributed to a lack of proper policy discussion; a lack of pluralism in the formation of health care policies (with low participation from citizens and high mobilization among structural interest groups); and the low priority of health care in public sector reforms. Portuguese politicians should be aware of the pitfalls of the current political system that constrain participatory arrangements and pluralism in policy making. In order to pursue health care reform, future governments will need to counterbalance the strong influence of structural interest groups.     

Y-chromosome haplotype analysis in Antioquia (Colombia)

Allele frequencies and haplotype analysis have been performed for eight Y-chromosome STRs (DYS19, DYS385 I and II, DYS389 I and II, DYS390, DYS391, DYS392, DYS393). Population data was obtained from a sample of 400 unrelated individuals living in Antioquia (Colombia). A total of 270 different haplotypes were found, and the haplotype diversity was 0.989. The first and second most frequent haplotypes where shared by 8 and 6% of the individuals, respectively.     

The legal concept of personhood in Colombia: are there biological reasons to change it?]

Nowadays, as a consequence of scientific advances in embryology, genetics and assisted reproduction techniques, the scientific community ask for new laws to establish new parameters to use with these recent discoveries. Discoveries that have changed the legal concept of "person". In many countries this concept is absolutely useless when facing new techniques such as cloning, stem cell research and embryo storage. That is why it is necessary to change its definition to guarantee the right to life and give a better protection to human embryos.     

European Regional Policy and Backward Regions: Implications Towards EU Enlargement

In this paper we show that the success of the EU Regional Policy, in terms of boosting growth in objective 1 regions, will mean a big opportunity for Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) and hence the increases in competition arising from an enlarged European market combined with a suitable regional development policy should in the future boost the growth of those countries. In the last part of the paper we made a simulation for the funding envelope from 2007, based on the 2000–2006 budget. We show that the figures of the Agenda 2000 provide enough financial support for 90% of the total CEEC population and for 75% of current objective 1 population.     

Informal payments for health care: definitions, distinctions, and dilemmas

There is increasing interest in the issue of informal payments for health care in low- and middle-income countries. Emerging evidence suggests that the phenomenon is both diverse, including many variants from cash payments to in-kind contributions and from gift giving to informal charging, and widespread, reported from countries in at least three continents. However, cross-national research is hampered by the lack of consensus among researchers on the definition of informal payments, and the definitions that have been proposed are unable to incorporate all forms of the phenomenon that have been described so far. This article aims to overcome this limitation by proposing a new definition based on the concept of entitlement for services. First, the various forms of informal payment observed in practice are reviewed briefly. Then, some of the proposed definitions are discussed, pointing out that none of the distinctive characteristics implied by these definitions, including illegality, informality, and corruption, is adequate to capture all varieties of the phenomenon. Next, an alternative definition is formulated, which identifies the distinctive feature common to all forms of informal payments as something that is contributed in addition to the terms of entitlement. Then, the boundaries implied by this definition are explored and, finally, the implications for research and policy making are discussed with reference to the lessons developed countries can learn from the experiences of transitional countries.