Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

"Impossible Subjects explores the origins of the concept of the ‘illegal alien’ in the United States. Ngai begins her book by exploring the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924. While most historians have focused on how this law discriminated against Eastern and Southern Europeans, Ngai focuses on its effects on immigration from Asia and Mexico. The law, she argues, furthered the already existing process of Asian exclusion by barring East and South Asians from immigrating. Although the Act placed no limits on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, the US government enhanced immigration enforcement by also introducing the Border Patrol that same year. Because the Border Patrol was meant to police the entrance of migrants, its creation gave significance to the act of crossing the border illegally. As such, Ngai argues, Asians and Mexicans became impossible subjects “whose inclusion in the nation was at once a social reality and a legal impossibility.” Because Asian Americans and Mexican Americans were identified and treated as aliens despite their citizenship, they too experienced lives as impossible subjects. The book concludes with the passage of the Hart-Celler Act. Although the Act has been long heralded as one of the liberal victories of the 1960s because it helped to repeal the system of national origins quotas, Ngai sheds light on another aspect of it: the law introduced for the first time numerical caps on the Western Hemisphere without taking into consideration Mexico’s longstanding migration to the United States. Thereafter, Latin Americans would find it much harder to migrate legally to the United States."

"Yes. This book is by Mae Ngai , who is a well-established historian here in the US. This is the only book on the list that was not published in the past two years. Impossible Subjects is a classic text, it was the first book that really demonstrated the relationship between racist ideas and immigration restrictions in the United States. She shows that notions of citizenship and belonging are not things that are fixed, but rather are created through media, through discourses in a society, and then get put in place through laws. She argues that the laws both reflect the views of a particular time, but then also create and bring into being the exclusions and categories of white and nonwhite that were inchoate before they were put into law. “The unusual period is the 1960s through the early 2000s, when racist thought was pushed to the side” The book focuses on the early period of US immigration law, but the histories that she is tracing from the 1920s are still affecting us today. That 1924 law gets revised in 1952, and then again in 1965. That is still the immigration law that we have in the United States. So, the idea that there should be quotas for how many people can come in is still in place. The configurations have changed, but we are still operating under the same general parameters that were put in place in 1924. Many of the people on the right, who are pushing for more restrictive systems, will often refer back to that 1924 law as the model, as what the US should be aspiring to recreate in the country. You have to understand the history that she describes in that book in order to understand what is happening in the present."

"Mae Ngai helps us understand what we can learn from the history of the idea of an “illegal immigrant”. Before the Chinese Exclusion Act there were, for the most part, no illegal immigrants because there was very little immigration law. Lee’s book shows how an immigration bureaucracy was created and began to grow for the purpose of excluding Chinese immigrants. Ngai takes the story into the 20th century, and shows how the idea of the illegal migrant was invented, along with the construction of Mexican-Americans as illegals. “Before the Chinese Exclusion Act there were, for the most part, no illegal immigrants because there was very little immigration law.” Ngai wants you to understand, among other things, why and how Mexican-Americans came to represent the “illegal immigrant” in the American mind. For various reasons, immigration quotas and other political and demographic changes lessened the flow of migrants from Europe. But the United States still needed – as it does today – unskilled labour, and immigrants from Mexico began to fill that gap. At the same time, the immigration bureaucracy was reaching inside United States territory to identify illegal immigrants. It is partly for this historically contingent reason that Americans attach an entirely different normative significance to recent Latino immigrants than they do to immigrants from the often romanticised period of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s being fought out today in the ongoing debate about changing American law to deny citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants. For over a century most Americans, including Supreme Court Justices , believed that the question of birthright citizenship had been settled. That debate is an extension of the controversy that emerged in the wake of the Court’s 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford , where Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that no African American could be a United States citizen. (Taney’s decision was reversed by the 14th Amendment, which seemed to establish birthright citizenship.) That was a question that goes back to the founding, and to whether Americans created egalitarian or ascriptive citizenship. Over two centuries after the founding, we are still debating the basic question of what type of citizenship comports with core American values."