Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.

AuthorVolpp, Leti
PositionBrief Article - Book Review

IMPOSSIBLE SUBJECTS: ILLEGAL ALIENS AND THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA. By Mae Ngai. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. 377. $35.

INTRODUCTION

America is a nation of immigrants, according to our national narrative. This is the America with its gates open to the world, as well as the America of the melting pot. (1)

Underpinning this national narrative is a very particular story of immigration that foregrounds the inclusion of immigrants, rather than their exclusion. Highlighted in this story is the period before 1924, of relatively unfettered European immigration, and the period after 1965, post the lifting of national origins quotas. Also underlying this national narrative is a particular story about what happens once immigrants enter. In this story the immigrant traverses smoothly from settlement to assimilation and then citizenship. This social experience is accompanied by a teleology of legal categorization, whereby the immigrant is first lawfully admitted as a permanent resident, and then naturalizes to become a citizen. (2)

In a stunning and beautifully written book, historian Mae Ngai (3) directs our attention to a history occluded in our national narrative of immigration and citizenship. Impossible Subjects examines the woefully understudied period between 1924 and 1965, the tenure of the national origins quota system. This era began with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in 1924 and ended with the lifting of national origins quotas with the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. This epoch, the most comprehensive immigration restriction in U.S. history, literally "remapped the nation" (p. 3). The period of 1924 through 1965 remapped the nation by developing both a particular racial and ethnic identity and a "new sense of territoriality" (p. 3). Broad-based immigration exclusion created a heightened sense of national borders as well as the state surveillance of those borders, which helped produce what we now know as the "illegal alien."

Ngai's book does not only focus on an understudied historical period of immigration regulation; it also centers immigrants who are marginalized in immigration scholarship. The subject of her book is not the legal permanent resident enjoying an untroubled route to American citizenship. Instead, Impossible Subjects primarily concentrates on immigrants variously categorized as illegal aliens, alien citizens, colonial subjects, and contract laborers. (4)

These are immigrants whose experiences we do not center in our national narrative. As a result, the juridical regulation that governed them has been so hidden in both national and community memory that we suffer a collective amnesia. Ngai turns our attention to laws and policies, such as those governing the Chinese Confession Program of the 1950s, Japanese American citizenship renunciation in the 1940s, and Filipino voluntary repatriation in the 1930s, that have largely or completely escaped the purview of legal scholarship. (5) Impossible Subjects features meticulous research that fills important gaps in our knowledge of the history of immigration law. But the book does not merely show us a new archive; Ngai turns her research to important analytical use.

Throughout the book, Ngai reminds us that what we experience today as common sense in terms of our immigration law and policy is historically contingent. She describes policies which in the contemporary moment seem unthinkable, either in their progressivity (for example, statutes of limitation on the federal power to deport, which prohibited deportation after the immigrant had resided for one year in the United States) or in their regressivity (for example, the policy of "pre-examination," which restricted this form of legalization to European immigrants). (6) The two examples of these policies, both of which magically turned illegal immigrants into lawful ones, also demonstrate a central theme of the book. What we believe to be hardened borders of citizenship and immigrant status have in actuality been enormously malleable. Both citizens and aliens have been "made" and "unmade," through both acts of the state and of the individual. And the border between the "legal" and the "illegal" has been porous. At the heart of the book are the questions of illegality in immigration and how illegal immigration came to be cast as the central problem of U.S. immigration policy in the twentieth century.

Today the conflation of the racial identity "Mexican" with the term "illegal alien" is indisputable. The two terms completely subsume one another in a way that aligns with our everyday understanding of immigration control--even while this does not track empirical fact. (7) Impossible Subjects shows us how this conflation was historically created. Ngai demonstrates precisely how the "illegal alien" was produced as a new legal and political subject and how it became synonymous with the racial identity "Mexican."

Presumptive illegality has not only shaped the experiences of those branded as "illegal aliens." Ngai traces how the presence of large illegal populations in certain communities has contributed to the construction of Asian and Latino communities in general as illegitimate, criminal, and unassimilable. These communities are peopled by what Ngai calls "alien citizens" (p. 2), persons who enjoy the formal status of citizenship as an immigration matter, but lack citizenship as a matter of identity. An important section of Impossible Subjects is devoted to the notion of alien citizenship.

Impossible Subjects is incredibly rich in its archival detail, powerful in its argument, and broad in its scope. I will first focus on Ngai's analysis of the historical construction of the illegal alien through what may seem, at first blush, paradoxical: the regulation of legal immigration, first, in the form of national origins quotas from the Eastern Hemisphere, second, in the form of the bracero program made up of workers from Mexico, and, third, through the retention of numerical per-country quotas in 1965. I will discuss this history in light of President George W. Bush's proposal to create a new guest-worker program, as well as Samuel Huntington's controversial new book, Who Are We, (8) which calls for curbing immigration from Mexico in light of its threat to "American national identity."

I will then turn to Ngai's discussion of "alien citizens." Ngai analyzes a relationship between migrancy, nationalism, and war that is made visible in the renunciation by 5,500 Japanese Americans in internment camps of their U.S. citizenship during World War II, as well as the legalization of 30,000 Chinese Americans who "confessed" their illegal immigration status during the Cold War period. I will consider these questions in light of the present "war on terror."

  1. ILLEGAL ALIENS

    Ngai begins Impossible Subjects by explaining how the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 was simultaneously the end of one era and the beginning of another. The Act ended unlimited immigration from Europe and for the first time imposed numerical limits on immigration through a quota system that ranked the world's population in terms of nationality and race.

    Many scholars have made reference to the fact that the Act aimed to curtail immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, which soared after World War I. (9) The Act accomplished this through basing the quotas, first, on figures from 1890, and later, on the census of 1920. Ngai explains, in compelling and disturbing detail, why there was such a shift. The temporary quota of two percent of the foreign born population in 1890, as explicitly discriminatory, was recognized by the nativists who led the drive for restriction to be potentially controversial. (10) Shifting to a quota based on the 1920 census allowed similar numerical results, inflating the number of Northern European slots, now with the appearance of nondiscrimination (p. 22). Apportioning slots on the basis of the 1920 census could reach the same results, even after mass immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, through switching the statistical pool. The 1920 figures apportioned slots not solely based upon the foreign-born population, but upon the entire population of the United States, immigrant and otherwise, thus maintaining the statistical advantage of Northern Europeans. Doing otherwise would, in the words of the immigration restrictionist whose concept grounded the 1924 Act, discriminate against "those who have arrived at an earlier date and thereby contributed more to the advancement of the nation" (p. 22). Basing quotas on these 1920 figures enabled Great Britain and Northern Ireland in 1929 to receive an annual quota of 65,721 persons a year, in contrast to 2,784 for Russia, and 5,802 for Italy (pp. 28-29 table 1.1).

    But the 1924 Act did not actually consider the entire population of the United States. Rather, whites were the only population counted for purposes of developing national quotas. The law stipulated that "'inhabitants in the continental United States in 1920' does not include (1) immigrants from the [Western Hemisphere] or their descendants, (2) aliens ineligible for citizenship or their descendants, (3) the descendants of slave immigrants, or (4) the descendants of the American aborigines" (p. 26). Thus, the "colored races" were erased from the history of national origins of America (p. 27). (11)

    This is how the United States largely closed its doors to the undesirable races of Southern and Eastern Europe, while simultaneously drawing a color line around Europe, not through it (p. 17). Thus while erecting a hierarchy of difference within Europe, the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act also asserted an American race entirely made up of European descendants.

    Formally, the quota system encompassed all countries in the world, except for the Western Hemisphere, which was exempted due to American diplomatic and trade interests with Canada and Mexico and the need...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT