Impossible Subjects

Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

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by Mae M. Ngai

Princeton University Press

Due/Published February 2004, 368 pages, cloth

ISBN 0691074712

This book traces the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, explaining why and how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy--a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century.

Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s--its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. In well-drawn historical portraits, Ngai peoples her study with the Filipinos, Mexicans, Japanese, and Chinese who comprised, variously, illegal aliens, alien citizens, colonial subjects, and imported contract workers. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, re-mapped the nation both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol. This yielded the "illegal alien," a new legal and political subject whose inclusion in the nation was a social reality but a legal impossibility--a subject without rights and excluded from citizenship. Questions of fundamental legal status created new challenges for liberal democratic society and have directly informed the politics of multiculturalism and national belonging in our time.

WIth analysis based on extensive archival research, including previously unstudied records of the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service and contributing to American history, legal history, and ethnic studies, Impossible Subjects is a major reconsideration of U.S. immigration in the twentieth century.

"Impossible Subjects' makes an outstanding contribution to U.S. histories of race and citizenship. Ngai's excellent discussions of the figure of the illegal alien, and laws regarding immigration and citizenship, demonstrate the history of U.S. citizenship as an institution that produces racial differences. This history explains why struggles over race, immigration, and citizenship continue today." -- Lisa Lowe, UC San Diego, author of Immigrant Acts

"While vernacular discussion of the so-called 'illegal alien' in the United States has generally fixed on the alien side of the equation, Mae Ngai's luminous new book focuses rather on the illegal--the bureaucratic and ideological machinery within legislatures and the courts--that has created a very particular kind of pariah group. Impossible subjects is a beautifully executed and important contribution: judicious yet impassioned, crisply written, eye-opening, and at moments fully devastating. All of which is to say, brilliant. Would that such a story need not be told." -- Matthew Frye Jacobson, Yale University

"In 'Impossible Subjects' Mae Ngai has written a stunning history of U.S. immigration policy and practice in that often forgotten period, 1924-1965. Employing rich archival evidence and case studies, Ngai marvelously shows how immigration law was used as a tool to fashion American racial policy particularly toward Asians and Mexicans though the differential employment of concepts such as "illegal aliens," "national origins," and "racial ineligibility to citizenship". For those weaned on the liberal rhetoric of an immigrant America this will be a most eye-opening read." -- Ramón A. Gutiérrez, author, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away

Review

The issue of immigration, known to some as the “problem” of immigration, has become a persistent feature of U. S. political discourse. The presence of immigrants and illegal aliens at once affirms the narrative of American exceptionalism and upsets notions of sovereignty and national identity. In this lucid new history, Mae M. Ngai describes the development of U.S. immigration policy in the crucial years between 1924 and 1965. Ngai’s history examines how restrictive immigration policies and the concept of the illegal alien are inextricably tied to American ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and the nation-state. Ngai begins with a discussion of the invention and codification of new racial categories to limit and determine citizenship. She also considers the implications of tightening of U.S. borders in the middle of the twentieth century to prevent Mexican immigration. Unlike many other studies on immigration, Impossible Subjects thoughtfully ties U. S. immigration policy to changes in the international political and economic order after World War I. In particular, she focuses on the role that American world power has played in the global patterns of migration. Beyond examining the legislative and judicial aspects of U. S. immigration policy, Ngai examines the particular experiences of Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, and Mexicans, who variously comprised illegal aliens, alien citizens, colonial subjects, and foreign contract-workers. In the concluding section, Ngai presents an original and penetrating critique of the celebrated passage of the 1965 immigrant act, which ended racial quotas but sustained the regime of immigration restrictions. Ngai’s superlative new work offers a range of new theoretical and historical perspectives from which to consider U.S. immigration policy. She perceptively and clearly analyzes the historical contingency of concepts of race, citizenship, sovereignty, and the nation-state, offering an essential contribution to our understanding of immigration.