Law, immigration and exclusion in Italy and Spain

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.