Inside the State

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 dug deep into 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 immigration and labor, as well as refuting stereotypical 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 difficult research into vested interests and agency 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 & 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 people, she emphasizes -- that deal with these controversial issues.