Recently, Spain became a country of large-scale immigration which makes it a good case study on immigrants and their criminalization. This article argues that rather than controlling the number of immigrants entering Spain, Spanish immigration laws focus primarily on defining levels of social and economic inclusion/exclusion. In addition it argues that these policies are crafted in a way that the predictable consequence is to marginalize third-world immigrants and consign them to the extensive underground economy, as a kind of economic punishment for their illegal immigrant status. This article begins with a brief discussion of the overlaps between the concepts of the illegal immigrant and the criminal deviant, and the analytical insights that might be gained by exploring parallels between the economic and criminal punishments to which they are respectively subject. The article continues by providing an overview of immigration to Spain and Spanish immigration policy and concludes by focusing on the ways in which these policies simultaneously punish and marginalize the immigrant, thereby constructing and reconstructing their outsider status. In Spain, it is the one realm in which they are most criminalized and penalized, the labor market, that illegal immigrants are most highly valued. References