Inside the State: The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S.

by Kitty Calavita

The recognized socio-legal study of the Bracero labor program, why it failed, and what that means to immigration policy and organizational theory. Professor Calavita unearthed long-buried INS and Congressional records, and conducted extensive personal interviews of the people involved, to figure out why this program of temporary farmworkers, which dominated for more than two decades in the Southwest U.S., ultimately collapsed. Her findings say a lot about the catch-22 of migration and labor, as well as refuting stereotypic political theory of agency "capture" to explain the program's demise. They also tell a fascinating methodological story of entrenched agencies and the sheer archaeology of stubborn research into vested interests and bureaucratic inertia. This book has been adopted in many college classes over the years, and now is available in its 2010 edition with the author's new Foreword as part of the Classics of Law and Society Series: a classic book with continuing substantive and methodological value. As the 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 tension between popular perceptions of immigration, the needs for agricultural labor, and the dynamics inside the state's administrative structures -- in fact the human actors, she emphasizes -- that deal with these controversial issues. Also available in high-quality digital and ebook formats from Quid Pro, for flexible classroom adoptions and worldwide accessibility.

294 pages, Paperback

First published July 12, 2010

About the author

Kitty Calavita is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. She is currently studying the implementation of immigration policy in Italy and Spain. Much of her work examines the interplay of political, ideological, and economic factors in the implementation of immigration law and in the treatment of white-collar crime, and in both cases it explores what these dynamics can tell us about relations of power and state processes. Her recent article, "The Paradoxes of Race, Class, Identity, and 'Passing:' Enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Acts, 1882-1910," Law and Social Inquiry (2000), links the everyday dilemmas of frontline immigration inspectors to contradictory assumptions about the nature of race, class, and identity. Her book, Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe, published by Cambridge University Press, will be available in January, 2005.

Reviews

[sdw · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book provides an administrative history of the INS during the bracero program. This book gives you a sense of how and why the INS operated, how it dealt with growers, and how it dealt with other agencies (mostly the Department of Labor). The author explains “This dialectical model posits that the political economy of a capitalist democracy contains within it specific contradictions, and that law often represents the state’s attempt to grapple with or reconcile the conflicts derived from those contradictions. To the extent that the contradictions are entrenched in the political-economic structure, the attempted resolutions are doomed to failure but give rise to further conflict.” Here, the attempt to reconcile capitalist contradictions that the INS is forced to deal with is the bracero program. The author situates herself against a purely structuralist reading which would see the state acting in accordance with the capitalist (growers). Instead, she argues that the state is not monolithic and while its desires overlap with the capitalists quite a bit, it is capable of acting in its interests. She shows the way that government divisions played out and the way that INS was interested in its public image around undocumented immigration. Replacing undocumented workers with documented braceros helped their public image and catering to the growers’ wants kept the growers on board with the program. This book will provide you with oodles of details about the history of the bureaucratic juggernaut we deal with in struggle for all humans to be treated with dignity and to reject the idea that any human being can be illegal.

On a side note, she seemed completely ignorant of the history of asian exclusion. This bothered me.