Calavita Kitty. Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe

Cambridge University Press, 2005. — 279 p.Spain and Italy have recently become countries of large-scale immigration. This provocative book explores immigration law and the immigrant experience in these southern European nations, and exposes the tension between the temporary and contingent legal status of most immigrants, and the government emphasis on integration. The book reveals that while law and the rhetoric of policymakers stress the urgency of integration, not only are they failing in that effort, but law itself plays a role in that failure. In addressing this paradox, the author combines theoretical insights and extensive data from myriad sources collected over more than a decade to demonstrate the connections among immigrants’ role as cheap labor – carefully inscribed in law – and their social exclusion, criminalization, and racialization. Extrapolating from this economics of alterite, this book engages more general questions of citizenship, belonging, race and community in this global era.
KITTY CALAVITA is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She has published widely in the area of law and society, and her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, and the Fulbright Program. She was President of the Law and Society Association from 2000 to 2001. She has lived and traveled extensively in southern Europe.