Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe
This provocative volume explores immigration law in Spain and Italy, and exposes the tension between the temporary legal status of most immigrants, and the government emphasis on integration. It demonstrates the connections among immigrants' role as cheap labor—carefully inscribed in law—and their social exclusion and racialization. At the broadest level, the book engages questions of citizenship and belonging in this global era. It uniquely combines analysis of immigration laws and immigrants' daily experiences.
1100953629
Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe
This provocative volume explores immigration law in Spain and Italy, and exposes the tension between the temporary legal status of most immigrants, and the government emphasis on integration. It demonstrates the connections among immigrants' role as cheap labor—carefully inscribed in law—and their social exclusion and racialization. At the broadest level, the book engages questions of citizenship and belonging in this global era. It uniquely combines analysis of immigration laws and immigrants' daily experiences.
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Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe

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

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

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

by Kitty Calavita

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Overview

This provocative volume explores immigration law in Spain and Italy, and exposes the tension between the temporary legal status of most immigrants, and the government emphasis on integration. It demonstrates the connections among immigrants' role as cheap labor—carefully inscribed in law—and their social exclusion and racialization. At the broadest level, the book engages questions of citizenship and belonging in this global era. It uniquely combines analysis of immigration laws and immigrants' daily experiences.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780521609128
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication date: 02/17/2005
Series: Cambridge Studies in Law and Society
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 280
Product dimensions: 5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

University of California, Irvine.

Read an Excerpt

Immigrants at the Margins
Cambridge University Press
0521846633 - Immigrants at the Margins - Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe - by Kitty Calavita
Excerpt



CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION


We are discovering the richness that diversity brings . . . We are dedicated to the effort of integrating immigrants into Spanish society.

Director-General of the Spanish Institute of Migration and Social Services1

Legal immigration that is integrated into the economic and social fabric . . . is a precious resource.

Italian Minister of the Interior2

We don't work with immigrants of color.

Sign posted in apartment rental agency, Parma, Italy

On February 5, 2000, a group of local men in the Spanish province of Almería set up barricades across the roads leading to the remote agricultural town of El Ejido. Then they stormed the neighborhoods of North African farmworkers, burned tires, turned over cars, and ransacked a Muslim butchershop. The rampage continued for days, as locals armed with knives, rocks, crowbars, and baseball bats set fire to immigrants' homes, stores, and cars, and went on a "caza del moro."3 By the time it was over, more than seventy people had been injured and hundreds of immigrant farmworkers left homeless.4

A year later, in the small, southern Italian town of Salandra, angry nationals attacked an orphanage where thirty-one Albanian children were staying. Crying "Lynch the Albanians!" and carrying rocks and clubs, the mob of five hundred people was outraged that some Albanian boys "had looked at" local girls during a neighborhood get-together.5

I begin with these two episodes not because they are particularly unique - sadly such anti-immigrant violence is quite common - nor on the other hand because they are representative of the attitudes of most Spaniards and Italians. But, they serve here as emblems of something both more subtle and more consequential - the real and perceived status of such immigrants as marginalized Others.

Ghassan Hage introduces his book, White Nation, with the insight - gleaned from an analysis of graffiti in western Sydney, Australia - that there is a "structural affinity . . . between what is characterized as 'racist' and the discourse of the dominant culture," even when that discourse calls for tolerance and extols the benefits of multiculturalism.6 Just so, these outbursts of anti-immigrant racism in Spain and Italy may be the violent cousins of more civilized folk like "suspicion," "economic marginalization," and even "tolerance." The affinity is structural because underlying all of them is not just the common perception of immigrants as different but, at least as important, the structural location of immigrants as third-world laborers in first-world economies that in fact makes them different.

Immigration from third-world countries7 to Spain and Italy has increased dramatically in the last two decades. In the face of this influx, immigration policies - even those of the right-wing governments currently in power - place a priority on immigrant integration. In fact, "integration" has become a mantra on the lips of government officials, opposition party members, and immigrant advocates alike. But, despite all the rhetoric and policies aimed at facilitating integration, immigrants remain a class of pariahs, vulnerable to the kinds of attacks described here, and vulnerable too to the everyday experiences of exclusion that derive from and signify their marginality.

I explore here what that marginality and exclusion consist of, and how they are constructed and reconstructed in the web of daily practices, the operating procedures of local institutions, the economy, racialization, and law. Secondly, and related to this, I want to make sense of the paradox that while the law and the rhetoric of policymakers stress the urgency of immigrant integration, not only are they apparently failing in this endeavor, but law itself seems to play a role in that failure. Finally, the empirical focus on the dialectics of immigrants' inclusion/exclusion in these southern European countries will allow me to problematize more broadly the nature of citizenship, belonging, and community in this global era.

The El Ejido and Salandra incidents serve a literary purpose as an emblem of law's failure, but my use of them may have been misleading. This is not a "look-at-the-racists-freak-show."8 On the contrary, it is a look at something far freakier by virtue of its ordinariness: the largely routine and systematic practices that comprise exclusion, and that produce its entrenchment despite apparent government efforts to reverse it. In a moment, I will describe the circuitous route by which I came to this project and introduce the concepts and theoretical frameworks that are central to my argument. But, first, the context must be filled in.

SPAIN AND ITALY AS NEW COUNTRIES OF IMMIGRATION

Spain and Italy have long been countries of labor emigration, sending millions of working men, women, and children to virtually every corner of the globe beginning in the late 1800s. In the decades after World WarⅡ, Spaniards and Italians found labor opportunities closer to home, shuttling back and forth to north and central Europe where they supplied the backbone of the industrial labor force for the post-war economic boom.9

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, this migrant stream began to reverse itself, as many former emigrants returned home, and these southern European countries themselves attracted large numbers of immigrants from beyond their borders. The initial influx occurred at precisely the moment that northern European countries were closing their doors to third-world workers. To some extent, Spain and Italy became the "back door" for immigrants' intent on reaching the rest of Europe, but they also became alternative destinations.10

Italy experienced its own "economic miracle" in the post-World War II decades, and by the mid-1970s the gap between Italy and its northern European neighbors had narrowed. The increased employment opportunities and higher wage levels associated with this transformation attracted immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, much as in earlier years Italians had migrated north to better jobs. By 2003, an estimated 2.4 million foreigners lived, legally or illegally, in Italy, with the vast majority coming from outside the European Union.11 Most non-EU immigrants work in low-wage sectors of the economy such as domestic service, tourism, construction, and agriculture, but they are increasingly found in manufacturing too, especially in the small and medium-sized factories of the northeast.12

Spain's economy has traversed quite a different course from that of Italy, and has been shaped by a unique set of historical circumstances, most notably the Francoist regime. Since Franco's death in 1975, the Spanish economy has grown by spurts and starts, undergoing unprecedented levels of expansion between 1986 and 1990, when over two million new jobs were created, more than in any other European country.13 And, the economy has continued to expand, with the number of jobs growing by 24.2 percent from 1996 to 2001.14 While still lagging behind Italy in terms of real wages and standard of living, Spain too has gone far in narrowing the gap with the rest of the European Union. As in Italy, Spain's social protections have expanded rapidly and its welfare state is now almost comparable to that of other Western European democracies.

By 2004, over 1.6 million foreigners had legal residence in Spain, with almost two-thirds coming from outside the EU, and the vast majority of these coming from the third world.15 Even more concentrated in certain niches than in Italy and less likely to be found in manufacturing, most immigrants in Spain work in agriculture, domestic service, tourism, construction, or other low-paying and underground sectors of the economy.16 And, as in Italy, immigrant labor is lauded for the flexibility it provides the economy. The former Director-General of Migration once pointed out that a high unemployment rate and the need for immigrant workers are not mutually contradictory, noting that the Spanish labor market "contains certain rigidities" that third-world labor helps counteract.17

Despite much talk of coordinating policies at the EU level, most European immigration laws remain localized within the nation-state. It is true that borders have come down between the countries of the EU, and summits held and pacts signed on how to manage external migration. The Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 and the Schengen Agreement in 1995 provided for the free movement of EU citizens within the European Community and developed new technologies of collective security against migration-related crimes like drug-dealing, terrorism, and smuggling. The Treaty of Amsterdam three years later reiterated the commitment to solving collectively what was increasingly being seen as the immigration "problem," and the European Council of Tampere in 1999 floated a common refugee and asylum policy. But, by the time of the European Council summit in Seville, Spain, in June, 2002, virtually none of the many proposals for common immigration and refugee laws had been ratified. And, despite considerable posturing by the then President of the European Council, Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar, the Seville summit produced mostly squabbling and dissension, with the right-wing Spanish and Italian governments locking horns with more progressive states like France and Sweden.18

Spain and Italy passed their first comprehensive immigration laws in 1985 and 1986, respectively, and have subsequently enacted amendments, revisions, and regulatory changes with dizzying frequency. Academics and even government officials I spoke to complained of the difficulties of keeping up with the changes. (One can only imagine the frustrations of those whose lives and livelihoods depend directly on the ever-shifting black letter and red tape.)19 But, despite what seems like constant tinkering, some consistent themes characterize these laws. Above all, they are oriented toward immigration as a contingent or emergency labor supply; as such, they contain few provisions for permanent legal residency or naturalization, although as we will see later, that is beginning to change. "Regularization," or legalization, programs are implemented every few years, with applications reaching several hundred thousand.20 Those who are legalized, however, generally are given only temporary legal status and have to demonstrate continued formal employment and navigate a maze of government bureaucracies to renew their permits.

Side-by-side with this emphasis on immigrants as contingent workers, government policies stress the importance of immigrant "integration." I use this admittedly vague term deliberately, as it is the term used by policymakers and in the law itself. As I explain in more detail in Chapter 4, judging from the rhetoric and from the programs devised in its name, "integration" refers generally to social and cultural inclusion and tolerance for diversity, and is contrasted to segregation, exclusion, and rejection. The vagueness of the term is compounded by the varied strategies devised to enhance it, ranging from language courses and socialization classes designed ostensibly to assimilate, to tolerance campaigns that pitch the benefits of cultural difference, and multiculturalism.21

The first Spanish immigration law in 1985 was introduced with a Preamble proclaiming that its purpose was to guarantee foreign residents' rights and to integrate immigrants into Spanish society. A subsequent law in January, 2000, was titled "Law on the Rights and Liberties of Foreigners in Spain and their Social Integration." The Italian law of 1998 perhaps went furthest in this direction, calling for proactive efforts like the construction of ambitious reception centers that would provide arriving immigrants with food and shelter, and a wide range of cultural and social services designed to ease their transition into Italian society. Much of the emphasis on integration in both Spain and Italy is located at the local level, with a plethora of regional and municipal programs, including language courses, programs publicizing immigrant rights and how to access them, job training, multicultural aides in public schools, and what one might loosely call "diversity work" - the government rendition of the Colors of Benetton.22

In previous work, I have focused on the myriad ways Spanish and Italian laws marginalize immigrants, and the economic uses of that marginalization.23 While recognizing the integrationist language in these laws and policies, in that work I interpreted the rhetoric as just that - political language designed for symbolic purposes - while the substantive provisions of these policies marginalized and dis-integrated. In the present study, I revisit this emphasis on integration and find I am forced to take it seriously (for reasons I will elaborate in a moment). Instead of focusing solely on the economic uses to which immigrant marginality contributes, and consigning integration policies to the analytical sidelines, I ask here how and why apparently genuine integration policies fail, and how this failure is (or is not) linked to economic marginality and the laws that reproduce it.

My empirical focus on Spain and Italy is partly pragmatic: I can get along in both languages and have contacts in both countries. But, this focus also has substantial theoretical advantages. As countries that have undergone rapid economic (and, for Spain, political) transformations over the last several decades - almost overnight joining the roster of advanced capitalist democracies - they arguably experience the contradictions of capitalist development in intensified fashion, providing the observer with access to insights that might otherwise be missed. And, these brand-new countries of mass immigration give us a chance to watch the formulation of immigration policy and the incorporation of immigrant workers "from scratch" as it were, without the encumbrances of historical commitments or precedent, but replete with all the stubborn dilemmas and contradictions that are nonetheless structurally embedded in them. Finally, the dual-country focus both confirms the generalizability of the patterns exposed here, and allows us to interrogate the minor differences that emerge. Ultimately, I will argue that the dynamics of racialization and exclusion, and their links to the economic role that immigrants play in these late capitalist economies, roughly parallel those in the United States and other Western European nations despite considerable differences in political structures and historical contingencies.

The information on which the book is based was gathered over the course of more than a decade beginning in 1992, but mostly during a sabbatical in Barcelona in 1996 and - between 2000 and 2003 - during stints lasting from several weeks to two months in Spain and Italy. The data are eclectic, and include interviews with government officials, leaders of immigrant associations, union officials, academics, and employers; news media coverage; published and unpublished government documents; press conferences; and scholarly and other secondary sources. Many of these sources are in Italian or Spanish (and, in a few cases, Catalan), and the quotations I use here are my own translations. I have tried to remain as close to the original phraseology as possible, using literary license only to get around the untranslatable, or grossly infelicitous constructions.

As I explain in the following section, data sometimes make themselves heard even when we are busy focusing elsewhere. I do not subscribe to the extreme positivist position that data speak for themselves with no need for translation (metaphorically speaking), or emerge full-bodied from an unambiguous objective reality. But, sometimes they do scream at us over the din of other distracting noise and force us to pay attention. This is what happened to me as this project evolved.

I agree with Ben Agger that there is far too much "secret writing" in social science, in which both authorial agency and the deliberative process are obscured.24 In part to offset this tendency and in part to underscore the fluidity and complexity of the reality on the ground, I intersperse the academic voice in which this book is primarily written with a more personal narrative in which I expose the vagaries and serendipities of field work and the inevitable periods of confusion that are visited on all honest researchers.

TAKING FAILURE SERIOUSLY

The project began as an investigation of the relative importance of economic versus political factors in accounting for the outcome of immigration policies "on the ground." As summarized in my grant application to the National Science Foundation, I intended to study the effects of the 1998 and 2000 laws in Spain and Italy, respectively, expecting to find that the integrationist dimensions of these laws failed, regardless of the different political stripes of the country or region. I anticipated, for example, that these laws with their emphasis on social inclusion would have little impact on the number of illegal immigrants or on immigrant access to social services. And, because of the benefits of immigrant workers' marginality for these economies and especially for employers, I expected a convergence of outcomes (e.g. integration policy failures), despite the presence of more powerful, pro-immigrant labor unions in Italy and a governing coalition (at the time) of center-left forces that advocated on behalf of immigrants.25 Finally, I predicted that there would be more political emphasis on inclusion and integration in Italy's traditionally communist region of Emilia-Romagna than in the conservative region of Veneto where the anti-immigrant Northern League is strong, but that the economic utility of marginalized immigrants in both regions would result in similar levels of exclusion. So, armed with notions of symbolic law that had been useful in other contexts, I was prepared to find more talk of integration in politically progressive regions than in conservative ones (but similar outcomes of exclusion), and I was prepared to chalk it up to politics - or as Edelman so elegantly called it, "Political Language: Words that Succeed and Policies that Fail."26

My field research proved me wrong on both counts. I found that there is at least as much attention given to the issue of integration in Veneto as in Emilia-Romagna, and that in both cases the efforts go far beyond rhetoric or symbolism. Huge budgets are expended and substantial programs launched. As we will see in Chapter 4, the Director of Immigration in Veneto - himself a member of the right-wing National Alliance Party - has taken the lead in coordinating the effort to facilitate immigrant integration. It would be hard to dismiss these activities, which sometimes seem almost frenzied in their intensity, as empty symbolic gestures. In any case, there is no apparent political reason for policymakers in a conservative region like Veneto, where anti-immigrant rhetoric is more likely to win votes, to tout immigrant integration.

After an initial period of confusion in which I tried unsuccessfully to make sense of these realities within my symbolic law framework, I relinquished my preconceived notions - or, more accurately, they were forcibly taken from me. In the process, my empirical focus shifted to the far more difficult, and maybe ultimately more interesting, question of how immigrant marginality and exclusion get constructed and reconstructed despite apparently strenuous efforts to reverse them. In this focus on the constitution of immigrant otherness and exclusion, I draw from and hope to speak to several sets of literature and theoretical perspectives, most important of which are the law and society literature on law in action and the contradictions within law that get played out locally in daily administrative practices; the literature on anti-immigrant backlashes and fear of the "other" or "stranger"; Critical Race Theory and discussions of racial formation more generally; and the rapidly increasing scholarship on the concepts of citizenship, membership, and community within the context of globalization.

THE LIMITS OF LAW

At one level, this is a study of law's failure. A long tradition in the law and society field examines the discrepancy between law's apparent intent and its practice and outcome, now iconically referred to as the gap between the "law in the books" and the "law in action." While more recent work on the constitutive quality of law and society reveals this representation of two distinct stages of law to be overly simplistic,27 it may still be heuristically useful, as we will see.

Much early work in the area of legal impact focused on law's indeterminacy, concentrating on the courts and judicial decisions.28 More relevant here are studies that address the limitations of statutory change. Horny and Spohn's work on the limited effects of statutory reforms in the processing of rape cases is exemplary of this tradition.29 Their study reveals that despite lawmakers' assumptions that improvements in the treatment of rape victims would increase their willingness to participate in criminal prosecutions, the reforms had little effect on the number of reported rapes, rape arrests, or convictions. The authors conclude: "[R]eformers . . . overestimate the role of legal rules in controlling the behavior of decisionmakers . . . Statutory changes . . . must be interpreted and applied by decisionmakers who may not share the goals of those who championed their enactment." Citing "the large body of literature detailing the failure of legal reforms," they warn that to understand the potential for legal impact, "[I]t is important to understand not only the characteristics of the reform itself but also the structure of the system on which it is imposed."30

Another law and society tradition takes as its point of departure the administrative discretion on which law in action ultimately hinges. Lipsky's case study of enforcement discretion among social service workers concludes, for example, that public policies are effectively made in the field by low-level personnel who constitute a kind of "street-level bureaucracy."31 Other important work in this area, most notably Sudnow's study of the categorization of "normal crimes" and Emerson and Paley's research linking such classifications to institutional needs, focus on the impact of the perceived "downstream consequences" for the agency.32

Janet Gilboy, in her excellent study of the US immigration inspection process at a busy international airport (pre-9/11) has drawn attention to the external pressures that complicate inspectors' work (as, for example, when powerful Congressional constituents complain that their nanny was denied entry or hassled).33 Some of my own work on immigration law enforcement places such constraints in a structural context. For example, I have explored the ways the stubborn dilemmas of contemporary immigration law enforcement (and the external pressures those dilemmas are most tangibly constituted of) may ultimately derive from the structural contradictions surrounding immigration. In my study of the Bracero Program and my work on employer sanctions, the tension between recurring political demands to control the border versus the economic benefits of a cheap immigrant workforce, take center-stage.34

In more recent work on the Chinese Exclusion Laws of the late nineteenth century, I found a different kind of contradiction compounding the mix, as the conflicting cultural assumptions about race, class, and identity embedded in the law (and the ability of aspiring immigrants to capitalize on those conflicts) stymied inspectors as they struggled to sort Chinese entrants into a host of ambiguous, overlapping, and ultimately arbitrary conceptual categories.35 In contrast to Gilboy's work on typifications and Sudnow's portrait of routinization through the perceptual construction of normal cases, these inspectors faced dilemmas that were not only not resolved by attempts at routinization and typification, but were frequently compounded by them.

In a later study that focused on the importance of the lucrative trade with China during this period and the perceived dangers of alienating Chinese merchants, I located these dilemmas in their broader context. Drawing from Chambliss's dialectical-structural theory of lawmaking, I argued that the contradictions among extant material and political interests (for example, the tension between the political pressure to exclude the Chinese and the vast material interests relating to trade with China) produced a law and an accompanying set of ideological justifications (including assumptions about Chinese racial inferiority and the class superiority of Chinese merchants that apparently trumped their race) fraught with logical inconsistencies and internal contradictions. These inconsistencies, and the contradictions in the political economy they represented, confronted inspectors with the awesome task of reconciling the irreconcilable.36



© Cambridge University Press

Table of Contents

1. Introduction; 2. Legal framework and the wayward 'legs of law'; 3. 'Useful invaders': the economics of alterité; 4. Integrating the other; 5. The everyday dynamics of exclusion: work, health, and housing; 6. Fuel on the fire: politics, crime, and racialization; 7. Conclusion: immigrants and other strangers in the global marketplace.
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