The increasingly multiethnic composition of most industrialized societies, resulting from transnational migration, brings with it a set of fundamental social, cultural, and institutional transformations that have promoted debate and research in political and scholarly circles. If “the key debate is how to answer the question between the demands of cultural diversity within the framework of present day liberal democracies” (p. 5), language holds the key to that debate. Eva Codo´s book explores linguistic diversity in relation to opportunities of access, denouncing bureaucratic language as unable to make comprehensible the reproduction of social operations and relations of power that such bureaucracies represent.
The book examines these procedures through linguistic and metalinguistic observation and analysis in key sites “where policies become practice,” such as an immigration office in Barcelona: “It is there that the state becomes a tangible agent in the migratory experience” (p. 4). Coda’s book is equally important for linguistics and immigration studies, because by focusing on the bureaucratic language of state control over migrants, it focuses attention on the sociocultural and legal mechanisms that intervene as a major organizing agent in the migratory process. Codo’s analysis takes place on three levels – the social, the institutional, and the local (or the situated) – investigating the extent to which state policies and practices are guided by the values of social inclusion and the democratization of access, and thus investigating the quality of modern democracy.
Modern democracy, based on the cultural and linguistic diversity of individuals’ lives in the postmodern world, is closely related to gatekeeping interactions, as Gumperz (1982, Language and social identity, Cambridge University Press) pointed out. The notion of gatekeeping defines an interactional activity in which an institutional representative defines which candidates should be allowed to have access to socioeconomic resources. This book connects with research on gatekeeping, “as the social transformation brought about by the arrival of migrants cannot obscure the pervasiveness of group boundaries and the operation of old and new mechanisms of social exclusion” (9). Among other things, this is because newcomers´ different practices are calling into question accepted views of citizenship, national identity, and cultural homogeneity. This creates public fears related to language practices and the presence of newcomers. Through detailed linguistic observation, Codo and her research group show us that social inclusion vs. gatekeeping is connected to the information exchange that takes place discursively and in situated interaction in key sites like a migration office.
Despite its highly located research, this book is important for two broader reasons. It has to do with Spain, the member state that has received the largest number of new immigrant residents in the European Union (Joaquín Arango Vila-Belda, “Statistical indicators of integration,” in Alexander Heichlinger & Enric Ripoll, Regional data and statistics in Europe, European Institute of Public Administration and Institut d’Estadística de Catalunya, 2002, 149–153), and thus it is a powerful case study. Yet, given that the Mediterranean countries of the South reflect the same immigration dynamics, having gradually replaced the countries of the North as preferred destinations, the results of this research shed light on other southern European countries, giving the book broader interest.
