Kitty Calavita is Chancellor’s Professor Emerita of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California-Irvine. Her books include Inside the State (also available as an eBook and paperback from Quid Pro Books, adding a new preface by the author), Invitation to Law & Society (second edition), Immigrants at the Margins, Appealing to Justice, and Big Money Crime. She lives in Berkeley, California.
Now in its 2nd edition, this groundbreaking book uses a materialist theory of the state to explain the zigzagging policies over a century of policy that alternately encouraged and ostensibly were meant to control foreign labor. 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.
A socio-political study of the rise and fall of the Bracero worker program and what it means for immigration policy and organizational theory. A classic book with continuing substantive and methodological value. As a new Foreword notes, worries about immigration and labor persist, as does basic dysfunction of the present form of INS. Digging deeper reveals the persistence of a structural catch-22.