Immigrants at the Margins examines the paradoxical nature of immigration in Spain and Italy, two countries with long histories of population movements but with recent experiences of external labor immigration. On the one hand, Italian and Spanish immigration laws emphasize immigrant integration, but on the other hand, both countries treat immigrants strictly as workers, with their legal status dependent on work permits and contracts with employers. Thus, whereas both countries devote resources to programs geared to integration, their laws contribute to keeping immigrants at the margins, denying them permanent residence and restricting their ability to set down roots and to access citizenship and belonging. And while these observations capture the predicament of immigrants in these Mediterranean countries, they are also pertinent for an understanding of immigration to other major receiving countries. As such, this important book is relevant beyond these cases.
Relying on a wide array of empirical sources and making use of a sophisticated analytical lens, Calavita takes us on an examination of a crucial question that characterizes recent immigration in Italy and Spain: why do apparently genuine integration policies fail? Calavita elegantly argues that this failure is linked to the immigrants' economic marginality that the law reproduces. Empirically, she relies on sources such as interviews with government officials, leaders of immigrant associations, union officials, academics, and employers; news media coverage and press conferences; government documents; and other secondary sources. Theoretically, she draws on the literature on law in action, critical race theory, constructions of the “other” or “stranger,” racial formation, and citizenship and membership within the context of globalization. She points out that the tension between efforts to integrate and constructions of difference that contribute to immigrants' marginalization is the manifestation of a broader dialectic in political-economic relations. She observes that immigrants' usefulness rests precisely on their otherness; they are the others who are willing to work for low wages and under conditions that natives do not tolerate. At the same time, their marginality, which is reproduced by the law, marks them as a suspect population that disqualifies them for membership.
The analysis is based on an in-depth comparison of the political climate and economies of Italy and Spain (with important regional distinctions) at the time of increased immigration that predominantly originates in the Maghreb, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Calavita makes effective use of this comparative frame so that the empirical material is evenly utilized cross-nationally and never isolated analytically. An important image that emerges from this comparison is two highly heterogeneous countries with diverse internal economies, patterns of immigration, and political structures and trajectories. Calavita finds more similarities between the two nations than within them. At the same time, despite differences in overall political climates, both countries share similar tensions in their integration policies. In both countries, immigrants of different nationalities fare dissimilarly and are concentrated in different occupations and regions. Both countries have laws that pull immigrants in different directions, encouraging them to integrate and at the same time leaving them legally vulnerable so that they will be encouraged to repatriate. Both countries have enacted laws that make it nearly impossible for immigrants to gain full membership and to retain legal status over time. Both countries “irregularize” immigrants legally, thus guaranteeing that they will constitute a pool of workers excluded from adequate housing and health care and kept at the margins. And as is the case in other major receiving countries, in both countries, contemporary immigration law creates and re-creates an excluded population, with the potential to affect broader issues of citizenship and belonging. Noteworthy is that exposing the central role that immigration laws play, one can argue, highlights state power in a time when the nation-state is believed to be in decline.
Importantly, Calavita points out that immigrants' poverty and exclusion in the countries she examines should not be seen as immigrant-specific, a viewpoint that accentuates the immigrants' otherness. Indeed, the vulnerability and economic exclusion of immigrants can be seen as a reflection of the material uncertainty that many nonimmigrants also experience. Thus, immigrants are not so different from the large numbers of nonimmigrants who also have been dislocated and marginalized by structural changes.
This book is highly accessible. In spite of the volume of information, the complexity of analysis, and the vast coverage, the reading is never overwhelming. It should be an important reading for those interested in contemporary immigration, law and exclusion, citizenship and belonging, and globalization. Given the depth and coverage of different themes, it should have a wide readership. And I would highly recommend it to those concerned with issues of social and economic justice globally.
