Suchergebnisse

Introduction -- Types of society, types of law -- Law in the everyday, everywhere -- The color of law -- Many laws, many orders -- The talk versus the walk of law -- Law and social justice : plus ça change . . . -- Reflecting on law's image : an inward turn? -- Conclusion

Law and Society is a rapidly-growing interdisciplinary field that turns on its head the conventional, idealized view of the "Law" as a magisterial abstraction. Kitty Calavita's Invitation to Law and Society brilliantly brings to life the ways in which law shapes and manifests itself in the institutions and interactions of human society, while inviting the reader into conversations that introduce the field's dominant themes and most lively disagreements. Deftly interweaving scholarship with familiar personal examples, Calavita shows how scholars in the discipline are collectively engaged in a

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. This 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 alterité, this book engages more general questions of citizenship, belonging, race and community in this global era

Este artículo examina la contradicción que está en el fondo de las políticas de inmigración italianas y españolas entre las llamadas a la integración y la marginalidad asociada con el estatus temporal y contingente de la inmigración. Argumento aquí que esta tensión es estructural y refleja una contradicción subyacente en la economía política de estas sociedades postfordistas. En la segunda parte de este artículo examino esta misma tensión en la política de inmigración de los Estados Unidos, y exploro las formas en las que las propuestas actuales de reforma llevarían a la política de inmigración de este país más cerca de las de España e Italia. Hago notar que mientras que la tensión entre marginalización de los inmigrantes e integración ha caracterizado siempre la política de los Estados Unidos, la contradicción se ha intensificado al ser los inmigrantes un componente cada vez más visible de la fuerza de trabajo, complicando los intentos de reforma

This article explores immigration law in Italy and Spain and focuses on the tension between the economic, social and legal marginalization of immigrants on one hand and the rhetorical emphasis on integration on the other. I argue that this tension reflects the contradiction in their political economy, in which the utility of a cheap, contingent -marginalized- workforce is countered by a political backlash against the inevitably impoverished and thus racialized immigrant population. Further, I argue that law plays a central role in this alchemy of economics, race, and exclusion. Laws that make immigrants' sojourn in the host society contingent on their willingness to perform marginalized labor guarantee immigrant otherness and racialization. Confronted with this powerful economics of alterité, and the legal infrastructure that supports it, even the most ambitious projects of immigrant «integration» are doomed. ; Este artículo explora la legislación sobre inmigración en Italia y España, focalizándose en la tensión entre la marginalización económica, social y legal de los inmigrantes, por un lado, y el énfasis retórico en la integración, por otro. Argumenta que dicha tensión refleja la contradicción en su política económica, en la que la utilidad de la fuerza de trabajo barata, contingente -marginalizada- es contrarrestada por la reacción política contra la inevitablemente empobrecida y racializada población inmigrante. Además, argumenta que la legislación juega un rol central en esta alquimia de la economía, la raza y la exclusión. Las leyes que provocan que la estancia de los inmigrantes en la sociedad receptora dependa de su disposición a emplearse en ocupaciones marginalizadas, garantizan la alteridad y la racialización de los inmigrantes. Debiendo enfrentarse a esta poderosa economía de la alteridad, y a la insfraestructura legal que le da soporte, incluso el más ambicioso proyecto de «integración» de los inmigrantes está condenado.

The gendered nature of the immigration experience is shaped and reinforced by law, legal consciousness, and the normative understandings they help constitute. This article provides an overview of the role of gender in migration processes from a law and society perspective, and includes an empirical focus on the new immigration to Italy and Spain as an illustration of the utility of such an approach. Beginning with a brief summary of the literatures of feminist jurisprudence and law and migration, respectively, the small body of scholarship at the intersection of these fields is reviewed. The author then examines the new immigration to Italy and Spain and argues that this immigration and the policies that shape it highlight the role of the state in gendering immigrant labor and offer new angles from which to consider the interplay of gender, race, migration status, and marginality. In concluding, the author proposes that such exploration of immigrants' experiences in southern Europe reveals the surprising complexity of immigrants' multiple marginalities, and exposes the powerful contingencies of economic context, prevailing stereotypes, the particulars of state policy, and the agentive power of people struggling to survive.

Este artículo estudia el papel que juegan los inmigrantes irregulares en la política económica española, su criminalización y las distintas formas de castigo relacionadas con la condición de inmigrante irregular. Basado en datos secundarios, documentos oficiales e investigaciones de campo, argumento en este trabajo que las Leyes de Extranjería españolas se centran principalmente en definir los niveles de exclusión /inclusión socio-económica. La consecuencia de estas previsiones legales es la marginación de los inmigrantes, relegándolos a la economía sumergida como una especie de sanción económica derivada precisamente de su condición de inmigrante irregular. Finalmente, esta sanción y la marginación económica contribuyen a reforzar la 'flexibilidad' que los inmigrantes suministran a la economía post-Fordista, y por la que son tolerados a regañadientes.

This article explores the role of `irregular' immigrants in the political economy of Spain, their related criminalization and the forms of punishment that attach to their illegal status. Based on secondary data, government documents and field research, I argue that Spanish immigration laws primarily focus on defining levels of social and economic inclusion/exclusion, and that they have the consequence of marginalizing immigrants and consigning them to the extensive underground economy, as a kind of economic sanction for their illegal status. Finally, it is this punishment and the economic marginalization it helps constitute that shore up the `flexibility' that immigrants provide the post-Fordist economy and for which they are reluctantly tolerated.

Immigration policies in Italy and Spain — even the restrictive policies put in place over the last several years — emphasise the importance of immigrant 'integration'. At the same time, immigrants are welcome largely on the grounds that they fill important niches in the labour market, such as low-end jobs in construction, agriculture, and domestic service, that locals shun. This article explores the relationship between immigrants' economic function in this southern flank of the European fortress, and their ability to integrate into the host society. Specifically, it argues that it is immigrants' 'otherness' that is their calling card — their passport — in these new countries of immigration, and that their full integration into Spanish and Italian societies presumably would spell an end to their utility as 'others'. Further, it documents the difficulties of integrating those who are legally and economically marginalised and for whom that marginality is seen as their chief virtue. The author makes comparisons with 'Americanisation' programmes in industrialising America and suggests that in both cases, the contradiction between the cheap labour of immigrants and the need to integrate them helps explain both the motivation for integration efforts and their complications.

This article examines the structural contradictions underlying the difficulties of implementing the Chinese exclusion laws first enacted by the US Congress in 1882. I argue that these contradictions were grounded in the material and ideological conditions of the period, were reproduced in the unwieldy logic of the exclusion laws, and emerged as unresolvable enforcement dilemmas. Most important, the anti-Chinese racism on which the exclusion laws were based clashed with economic interests driven by the promise of lucrative trade with China. Using unpublished archival materials, the Congressional Record and Congressional reports, as well as annual reports of the enforcement bureaucracy, I show that exceptions to the exclusions for Chinese merchants were an attempt to reconcile this contradiction, and in turn generated formidable enforcement problems. Further, I argue that the impossibility of making sharp binary distinctions between merchants and 'coolies', and the humiliating procedures involved in the futile effort to do so, subjected the Immigration Bureau to criticism from exclusionists for their failure to detect fraud, and from the Chinese and their advocates in the business community for their harsh practices. The implications for sociolegal studies more generally are examined in the conclusion.