Vol. 16 No.1 (January 2006), pp.31-37

 

IMMIGRANTS AT THE MARGINS: LAW, RACE, AND EXCLUSION IN SOUTHERN EUROPE, by Kitty Calavita.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 278 pp.  Paperback. $39.99/£22.99 ISBN: 0-521-60912-7. Hardback. $90.00/£50.00. ISBN: 0-512-84663-3.

 

Reviewed by Marc-Georges Pufong, Department of Political Science, Valdosta State University, Valdosta, Georgia.  Email: mpufong [at] valdosta.edu.

 

Among several contending issues in the ongoing European economic integration, that include Spain, Italy and 23 other EU Member States, immigration certainly is at the centerfold. According to one observer, “migration is a latter-day Pandora’s Box in the social and economic issues it raises within EU” (Vatahov 2002). To others, international immigration and its consequences rank among the greatest problems of contemporary Europe. Accordingly, the nature and magnitude of migration problems causes the development of a common migration policy to seem indispensable (see EU Commission Communication of 3.12.2002).  For example, pursuant the outline anticipated in the Amsterdam Treaty (1999), the priorities developed and set out by the Tampere European Council (1999), an EU policy on migration and asylum has gradually been put into effect. Several components of this comprehensive EU policy are currently in force as enacted by the European Parliament and the Council.

 

In an anticipatory attempt to size the readiness of the then 10 EU Candidate Countries, a conference held in Slovenia on October 28, 2002, tackled the problem of illegal migration as well as migration related crimes in the South East region of the European Union. In attendance at that meeting were Ministers of Interior from Austria, Albania, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Macedonia, Romania, and Slovenia, as well as representatives of the Danish EU Presidency and the European Commission whose presence illuminated the seriousness of immigration concerns for the European Union. In the end, a joint declaration on European security standards was adopted for implementation in the South East European Region. Consistent with the Tempere European Council policy goals, the declaration committed signatory countries to joint immigration measures. The goal is to prevent and combat illegal migration and related criminal activities associated with immigration by establishing common standards and policies, harmonizing legislation, visa issues, policies for removal and readmission of aliens, as well as judicial and police co-operation (Vatahov 2002).

 

Thus, illegal immigration within the context of an enlarged EU is a big concern, especially through the so-called Balkan route, considered a primary source of illegal migration. Indeed, illegal movement is closely related to other forms of organized crimes, notably human trafficking.  According to Euro Statistics, in the recent years, human trafficking has become one of the most prevalent and lucrative criminal [*32] businesses surpassing the drug trade. Also according to a 1999 EU POLICY REPORT ON THE FUTURE OF IMMIGRATION, the EU had been preparing a range of policy measures to cope with these problems, including a system to reject groundless demands from asylum seekers, rapid repatriation, effective management of external borders, and readmission agreements with non-EU countries. However, a recent study confirms this seemingly urgent but contradictory outlook in EU immigration policy vis-à-vis stated policy of openness and free movement.  Gallyla Lahav (2004) asserts that both the EU public and elites favor adoption of restrictive immigration policies despite requirements of open borders, concluding that EU public opinion is not too diffuse to influence policy on immigration. Briefly stated, neither the public nor elites are likely to have liberal opinions on immigration issues.

 

In IMMIGRANTS AT THE MARGINS: LAW, RACE, AND EXLUSION IN SOUTHERN EUROPE, Kitty Calavita focuses on Spain and Italy. Both countries are member states of the European Union, and both are experiencing large-scale immigration. Calavita locates her study within the broader tradition of “law in action,” thus drawing from and extending her previous work on the contradictions of immigration law (see Calavita 2001). Her attention to detail is challenging and breathtaking. She sees contradiction in Italian and Spanish immigration laws that treat immigrants exclusively as workers with legal status contingent on their continued work permit. In her view, these laws pull into two directions. They cautiously welcome immigrants as workers on one hand, and yet on the other, restrict their ability to settle by denying them permanent residence, while underwriting ambitious programs designed to integrate them into the social and cultural life of the community.  To be sure, none of these options is optimally settling or satisfactory.

 

In this book Calavita explores immigration laws and immigrant experiences in these two southern European states. Her accounts show significant similarities to boarder states in the southern United States experiencing similar immigration issues. In her delineation, she exposes the tension between the observed temporary and contingent legal status of most immigrants in contrast to government emphasis on integration. Her argument demonstrates the gap between law and the rhetoric of politics, one that stresses urgency in facilitating integration. As demonstrated, while Spain and Italy fail in this effort, this paradox is addressed by combining theoretical insights with extensive data collected over a decade from a range of sources. Calavita demonstrates the connection between the role of immigrants as a source of cheap labor in both countries and their legal prescription tied to social exclusion, criminalization, and racialization. She extrapolates to more general questions of citizenship, belonging, race, and community, to contexts beyond Southern Europe and the EU in general. In the end, her approach in this book has both theoretical and practical relevance. Theoretically, she is interested in marginality and exclusion, and [*33] practically, on contradictions in seemingly divergent policy options. 

 

In Chapter 1, Calavita sets forth a foundation for the book with a painstaking account of how Spain and Italy, long considered exporters of labor, also became targets of large scale immigration during the 1970s and 1980s. Her initial assessment of the political and economic contexts also serves as the backdrop for further explaining the forces that shaped issues of immigration law in both countries. The influx of new immigrants to Spain and Italy, she observes, occurred at precisely the moment when northern European countries began closing their doors to third-world workers. In a way, the restrictive immigration policies of other European countries made both Spain and Italy alternative destinations. However, Calavita argues that increased economic opportunities and higher wages associated with a wide economic gap between Southern EU countries and those of northern Africa were by far most critical in attracting people who sought better paying jobs (pp.1-21).

 

In Chapter 2, Calavita provides the political and sociological context of law in action. Here she asserts a relationship between the politics of immigration and immigration law. She sets a central theme, one that not only questions but also describes how immigrant marginality is socially constructed and constantly reconstructed, despite similar and concurrent emphases on social integration in both countries. For Spain, especially, and Italy to lesser extent, 1985 is important because Spain became part of the European Union that year.  In addition, five other EC countries signed the Schengen Accords, whose intent was to foster unimpeded flow of immigration within Europe. While Spain did not join the Schengen Accords that year, it enacted its first organic law on rights and liberties of foreigners.  The law also was intended to control illegal immigration to the Spanish territory. Calavita concludes the chapter with discussion of illegalities built into more recent laws, the logical outcome of a system that welcomes third world immigrants because they provide the local economy with cheap labor. Put differently, for both Spain and Italy, Calavita agues that the contingent nature of immigrants’ legal status is underscored by instability inherent in the very programs designed to legalize them (pp.22-47). 

 

In Chapter 3, Calavita pays particular attention to demographics in order to trace the economic locations and working conditions of immigrants in both countries (pp.48-74).  To that end, she sketches the size, makeup, and geographic distribution of immigrant populations, as well as the Spanish and Italian economies, regional and structural political divisions. The picture that emerges from this assessment is what the author calls “economics of alterité.”   According to Calavita, immigrants’ location within the economy reinforces their “otherness” and does so through a stigmata of poverty.  In other words, she argues that regardless of the sector of employment or geographic region, immigrants are “others;” the notable “new untouchables” who do the work that local citizens largely shun. [*34]

 

In the end, what Chapter 3 captures best is the remarkable mutuality in legal and economic marginality of immigrants in both countries.  As Calavita sees it, this is how legally constructed “otherness” is compounded and partially reproduced in locations populated mainly by immigrants in both Spain and Italy. She sees in these two critical explanatory variables: (a) the fragility of immigrant legal status contributing to their disempowerment vis-à-vis employers; and (b) their concentration in the underground economy, which jeopardizes their ability to legalize their existing status.

 

Chapter 4 explores more thoroughly the contradictions inherent in the concept of “immigrant integration,” since it embodies a policy central to immigration politics in both countries as well as the broader European Union (pp.75-98). Integration, she argues, also reflects the sense of urgency which local political leaders, including those of anti-immigrant groups, attach to immigrant integration efforts in general. She sees efforts to enact laws or initiate policies and programs as an intense effort to integrate.  However, immigration policy in Spain and Italy hopes to fill the needs for labor but reflect suspicion of immigrants for their ‘Otherness.’ For a fuller picture, she also delves into the various meanings of immigrant integration by tracing the various laws, policies and programs designed to promote it. The concept of integration, she argues, “does yeoman’s work in both Italy and Spain. . . . [I]t fills semantic space between politically correct assimilation and the politically unpalatable multiculturalism,” and “promises a cohesive community while assuring respect for difference” (p.97).  Thus, Calavita concludes that immigrant marginality that is so beneficial to the economy of Spain and Italy also creates a class of outcasts that is unacceptable to liberal democracies that herald inclusiveness.

 

Chapter 5 focuses on the dynamics of immigrant exclusion despite claims of integration. Titled “The Everyday Dynamics of Exclusion: Work, Health, And Housing,” the chapter focuses on the daily expectations of immigrants mindful of their legal status which makes them vulnerable as a group (pp.99-124).  Armed with empirical information presented in preceding chapters, Calavita focuses on the difficulties encountered by immigrants in accessing fundamental necessities, such as housing and health facilities and the ripple effects of institutionalized irregularities for those who are either temporarily legal or illegal. She conceptualizes these necessities as “fundamental prerequisites for social belonging” as she revisits the marginalization implicit in policies that construct immigrants as contingent workers (p.100). In the face of marginality imposed by law, she argues, the push to integrate meets defeat halfway. She explores system breakdowns, and obstacles to their repair to demonstrate how institutionalized irregularities constructed by law, economic marginality, administrative-bureaucratic hurdles, and racialization interact to preclude immigrants’ full social participation, as well as the exercise of their rights in core arenas of health care and housing. Calavita [*35] concludes the chapter with an examination of immigrant groups who increasingly organize strikes and stage sit-ins, while demanding the realization of social and economic rights under current laws.

 

In Chapter 6, “Fuel on Fire: Politics, Crime, and Racialization,” Calavita delves into the stigmatized world of immigrants to examine criminalization, as well as political and media exploitation and related racialization – a theme explicit in the literature on immigration politics (pp.125-168). Immigrants, she argues, are excluded, treated as criminals, seen as different, considered dangerous, and above all, racialized “others.” While some scholars describe the social exclusion of “others” as a counterproductive effort at community building, Calavita sees racialization as part and parcel of the “economics of alterité” (a reference to difference), comparable to those who at other times and in other places were themselves declared racially inferior.  The dynamics she argues, are structurally driven, motivated and fueled by politicians and a media, who make a career from the frightened and the ghoulish. Inferring from a 2002 Italian and Spanish public opinion study demonstrating a significant correlation between immigrants and crime, Calavita argues that whatever the link, the symbolic criminalization of immigrants is fueled by hot political rhetoric and the media that thrive on the heat (p.129). Finally, furthering the argument made in Chapter 5 that exclusion from basic social amenities is an inevitable by-product of poverty and dysfunctional laws, the overall gist of Chapter 6 is that the racialized process of immigrant exclusion is reinforced by their criminalization stigma, a form of institutionalized irregularity.  

 

The Conclusion presents a summation of previous chapters but with a theme of its own. Calavita surmises that immigrants are caught in a “vicious circle” of exclusion, from which they are unlikely to escape. The larger argument of this book is that this pivot is itself the product of law and policies across the globalized economic community. It is a product of law, she argues, in alchemy of economics, race, identity, and exclusion in the sense that immigrants’ “otherness” is a legal construct formally codified.  This is true, of course, since immigration laws and policy construct people as non-citizens with limited rights and privileges.  Further, immigrants who achieve legal status no sooner find that their new status is contingent and unstable, with periods of illegality and vulnerability that bleeds into periods of legality.

 

Specifically, Italian and Spanish immigration laws makes it virtually impossible for immigrants to gain admission as legal residents outside those sectors where wages and working conditions are inadequate to attract sufficient local workers.  That is, law by its very effect, guarantees labor under conditions shunned by the indigenous working class, an arrangement that produces economic “otherness.” Yet, as skillfully argued by Calavita, even the most ambitious policies of “immigrant integration” are doomed by the very law it creates when confronted with the contradictory policy of economics of alterité [*36] (difference) within the legal infrastructure that supports it.  In many ways therefore, immigration exposes the contradictory nature of and fragmentation within the contemporary global economy, where those who need most are very much excluded, contrary to policies designed to do just the opposite.

 

In the final analysis, Calavita’s work invites a rethinking of consequences, a dialogue and discussion on issues involving immigrant inclusion and exclusion through politics, law and economics.  As intimated, her hope is to further understanding of the implications of immigration for citizenship, race, belonging, national identity, and the fashioning of an enduring global community.  In many ways IMMIGRANTS AT THE MARGINS is timely for understanding the implications of globalization as it intertwines with policies of both economic integration at the national level and laws written to facilitate free movement of citizens at the state level.  More importantly, her empirical focus on questions of how immigrant marginality and their exclusion are constructed and reconstructed despite equal efforts to reverse is very informative and highly commendable.

 

I see practical and theoretical importance in her work for graduate students and researchers interested in related issues of immigration and law. For example, the argument that globalization is fraught with contradictions, which inescapably unleashes a series of crises within privileged countries, which in turn exacerbates inequalities, is one to be taken seriously. Calavita’s empirical observation of the apparent failure of law and identification of the cause as inherent in contradictory policies is noteworthy.

 

Finally, in spite of Calavita’s penchant for detail and tendency toward repetition, her ultimate analysis and conclusion that depicts irony in policies and laws that welcome, while at the same time reject immigrants as community members in both Spain and Italy, is quite penetrating. The resulting tension, viewed through the prism of political and economic conflicts on immigration within the Italian and Spanish contexts, has profound implications for other countries with similar immigration policies (also see Lahav 2004).

 

REFERENCES:

Calavita, Kitty. 1989. “The Contradictions of Immigration Lawmaking: The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.” 11 LAW AND POLICY 17-47.

 

Calavita, Kitty. 2000. “The Paradoxes Of Race, Class, Identity And ‘Passing’: Enforcing The Chinese Exclusion Acts, 1882-1910.” 25 LAW AND SOCIAL INQUIRY 1-40.

 

Commission Communication of 3.12.2002 to the Council and European Parliament: INTEGRATING MIGRATION ISSUES IN THE EUROPEAN UNION’S RELATIONS WITH THIRD COUNTRIES: Part I. COM/2002/0703 final [*37]

 

Commission Communication of 3.12.2002 to the Council and European Parliament: MIGRATION AND DEVELOPMENT - II. REPORT ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF FINANCIAL RESOURCES AVAILABLE AT COMMUNITY LEVEL FOR REPATRIATION OF IMMIGRANTS AND REJECTED ASYLUM SEEKERS, FOR MANAGEMENT OF EXTERNAL BORDERS AND FOR ASYLUM AND MIGRATION PROJECTS IN THIRD COUNTRIES: Part II. COM/2002/0703 final

 

Conclusions of the Presidency TAMPERE EUROPEAN COUNCIL 15 AND 16 OCTOBER 1999 PRESIDENCY CONCLUSIONS INTRODUCTION TOWARDS A UNION OF FREEDOM, SECURITY AND JUSTICE.

 

Lahav, Gallya. 2004. IMMIGRATION POLICY AND POLITICS IN THE NEW EUROPE: REINVENTING BORDERS. New York: Cambridge University Press.

 

Policy Papers # 5. 2001. ON THE FUTURE OF EUROPE: THE COMMON CHALLENGE – MEMBER AND CANDIDATES FACING THE EU FUTURE MIGRATION POLICY.  Warsaw, Poland.

 

The TREATY OF AMSTERDAM, AMENDING THE TREATY ON EUROPEAN UNION, THE TREATIES ESTABLISHING THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES AND CERTAIN RELATED ACTS signed on October 2, 1997, and entered into force on May 1, 1999

 

Vatahov, Ivan.  2002. “Satisfying the EU On Illegal Migration,” SOFIA ECO MEDIA LTD. November .07, 2002.

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© Copyright 2006 by the author, Marc-Georges Pufong.