Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America - Book Review Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America by Mae Ngai During the 2016 election debates, candidate Trump proposed a solid wall as a solution for limiting illegal immigration from Mexico. Marginalization of the Chinese restricted them to the Chinatown ghettos, limiting their participation in society despite the Supreme Court ruling of 1898 that American born Chinese were citizens. (64) Weaving class conflict and creation, Ngai concludes that enforcement was the consolidation of American sovereignty over a physical territory. Ngai credit this attention to economic and political trends after World War I. and went on to Columbia University where she earned her M.A. Ngai points out the distinctions that were observed between groups of immigrants, highlighting the way culture defined new perceptions of American identity and territorial sovereignty.After World War I, the American Legion and the American Federation of Labor brought Congress’ attention to “hordes” of “impoverished people fleeing war-torn Europe were on the way” to Ellis Island. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.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.
Untrained officers in Border Control often overextended their physical areas of arrests and apprehension by hundreds of miles which led to a review and reform of Border Patrol legislation.Readers reminded throughout Ngai’s book that contemporary terms such as “alien” immediately equated to illegal Mexicans rather than a complex history of immigration restrictions of Europeans and Chinese. Immigration reform was particularly evident in the book’s conclusion in discussing a post-World War II America in which an influx of American Jews, Italian Americans, and Greek Americans, and others struggled for equality during the post-New Deal. Japanese Americans bought land to farm, opened shops, and learned western traditions whereas Chinese Americans were observed to hold onto traditions. Thus, the book is refreshing explaining the cultural quota of American populations experienced a series of policies coinciding with combinations of economic cycles of a post-industrial period and rhetoric of maintaining an American identity.As Ngai described it, the codification of immigration “remapped the nation in two important ways.” (3) First, “new ethnic and racial map based on new categories and hierarchies of difference” was drawn, and second, “a new sense of territoriality” was “marked by unprecedented awareness” through “state surveillance of the nation’s contiguous land borders.” (3) On the path to citizenship, Ngai reveals that the fear of Chinese laborers crossing physical boundaries from Canada and Mexico were misplaced. Impossible Subjects is a sweeping re-examination of U.S. immigration in the 20th century. They often used fraudulent certificates that identified them as merchants, claimed to be American citizens by native birth, or as the Chinese born sons of U.S. citizens, known formally as derivative citizens” (204)Masterfully put together, Ngai immediately follows the Chinese assimilation theme with a study of Japanese American experience during and after World War II. While lengthy and greatly detailed, Ngai compacted many of her major points into the conclusion that American cultural pluralism was becoming more prevalent which criticizes ideas of American nativism and cultural homogenizing assimilation in the United States. Impossible Subjects book.
[F]or background reading of 'illegal immigration' that takes a broader view, this is an outstanding book.---David M. Reimers, International History Review"Impossible Subjects' makes an outstanding contribution to U.S. histories of race and citizenship. Instead, many of the immigrants posed as persons who were legally admissible.