The Illegal Way In and The Moral Way Out

At the heart of the current debate about immigration we find a conflict of convictions. Many people seem to believe that a country has a right to decide who to let in and who to keep out, but quite often they appear equally committed to the view that it is morally wrong to expel someone from within the borders of their country if that would seriously jeopardise the person in question. While the first conviction leads to stricter border controls in an attempt to prevent would-be immigrants from entering the country illegally, the latter conviction ensures that aliens with a legitimate claim on protection will not be removed forcibly. It is not strange, therefore, that the task of pinning down a morally sound immigration policy is such an elusive enterprise.
In this paper I take it for granted that no electorate would be prepared to accept the kind of policy they ought to, and that we in consequence will continue to let in as few immigrants as is currently the case. Given this constraint I argue against two common assumptions concerning a viable immigration policy. First, granted that certain conditions are satisfied, professional smugglers should not face legal sanctions for bringing asylum seekers to a potential host country. Second, countries that limit immigration should not treat people seeking family reunion preferentially or on a par with other immigrants, but rather act so as to maximise the number of refugees allowed to enter.     

School readiness and later achievement

Using 6 longitudinal data sets, the authors estimate links between three key elements of school readiness--school-entry academic, attention, and socioemotional skills--and later school reading and math achievement. In an effort to isolate the effects of these school-entry skills, the authors ensured that most of their regression models control for cognitive, attention, and socioemotional skills measured prior to school entry, as well as a host of family background measures. Across all 6 studies, the strongest predictors of later achievement are school-entry math, reading, and attention skills. A meta-analysis of the results shows that early math skills have the greatest predictive power, followed by reading and then attention skills. By contrast, measures of socioemotional behaviors, including internalizing and externalizing problems and social skills, were generally insignificant predictors of later academic performance, even among children with relatively high levels of problem behavior. Patterns of association were similar for boys and girls and for children from high and low socioeconomic backgrounds.     

A Towel Less: Social Norms Enhance Pro-Environmental Behavior in Hotels

Previous research has shown that normative appeals to engage in environmentally friendly behavior were most effective when they were accompanied by a provincial norm (e.g., when norms matched individuals’ immediate situational circumstances). Analyzing hotel guests’ towel-use during their stay, the current study tests whether messages employing provincial norms were more effective in reducing towel-use than standard environmental messages. In line with previous findings, guests of two hotels used significantly fewer towels when provincial normative appeals—rather than standard environmental messages—were communicated. These findings corroborate to the body of research demonstrating the power of social norms on environmental behavior.     

Logic and Probability: Reasoning in Uncertain Environments – Introduction to the Special Issue

The current special issue focuses on logical and probabilistic approaches to reasoning in uncertain environments, both from a formal, conceptual and argumentative perspective as well as an empirical point of view. In the present introduction we give an overview of the types of problems addressed by the individual contributions of the special issue, based on fundamental distinctions employed in this area. We furthermore describe some of the general features of the special issue.     

Situating Standards in Practices: Multi Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis Treatment in India

Public health care needs to cope with a basic dilemma between providing standardized care within public programmes across entire and at times resource-constrained countries and adapting this care locally when responding to individual needs. This tension between standardization and local adaptation becomes particularly obvious for the prolonged and complicated treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). Situated standardization, as introduced by Zuiderent-Jerak [2007a, 2007b] offers a way out of this dilemma. It helps to focus on how standards need to be situated in practice rather than viewing standardization and local adaptation as mutually exclusive practices. How do actors relate standardization and individual care in their practices of treating MDR-TB? Results from qualitative fieldwork at the first MDR-TB treatment sites of the Indian TB programme show that actors situate standards in a particular way. They assess the role of guidelines in a particular situation and on that basis recognize the core recommendations of guidelines or go beyond the guidelines. This allows actors to negotiate how standards should be situated and reconciles the dilemma between local adaptation and standardization. Having guidelines internalized, as is common for Indian TB control, bears both promises and pitfalls for engaging in standardization processes in a situated manner. The results contribute to science and technology study scholarship on guideline development. They highlight how actors coordinate the situating of standards and how this depends upon cultures of control. This illustrates the potential of qualitative studies on local adaptation for guideline developers by revealing existing practices of relating and negotiating local adaptation and standardization.