Kitty Calavita Libri

Exploring the conflict between immigrants' legal status and the government's push for integration, this book delves into the complexities faced by immigrants navigating societal expectations and legal frameworks. It highlights the challenges and contradictions inherent in policies that seek to unify diverse populations while simultaneously imposing restrictive legal barriers. Through insightful analysis, the author sheds light on the broader implications for social cohesion and identity within immigrant communities.

Having gained access to California prisoners and corrections officials and to thousands of prisoners' written grievances and institutional responses, the authors take us inside one of the most significant, yet largely invisible, institutions in the United States.

Documents the internal decision-making processes of the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service - one of the federal government's most secretive agencies and one with huge discretionary powers. This work aims to analyze the links between abstract theories and real-life political institutions.

Reagan's 1986 immigration reform law offered a composite of contradictory measures: sanctions curtailed employment of undocumented workers while other programs enhanced labor supply. Immigration law today continues the theme of contradictions and unmet goals. But hasn't it always been so? Examining a century of U.S. immigration laws, from the nation's early stages of industrialization to enactment of the quota system, Calavita explores the hypocrisy, subtext, and racism permeating an unrelenting influx of European labor. Now in its Second Edition, this groundbreaking book offers a materialist theory of the state to explain the zigzagging policies that alternately encouraged and ostensibly were meant to control the influx. The author adds a 2020 Preface to place the historical record into modern relief, even in the age of presidential characterization of immigrants as violent criminals and terrorists. Writing in a new Foreword, Susan Bibler Coutin is "struck by the relevance of Calavita's analysis to current debates over immigration policy," as this social history "reveals alternatives to the present moment: over much of U.S. history, government officials actively recruited immigrants, even when segments of the public sought restrictions." The aim was not "social justice or human rights, but rather to fuel economic expansion, depress wages, and counter unionization." The book is recommended to a wide audience: "The theoretical discussion is accessible to new students as well as established scholars, and the rich documentary record sheds light on how current dynamics were set in motion." Back cover