Book
Impossible subjects : illegal aliens and the making of modern America
Edition
New paperback edition / with a new forward by the author.
Publication Information
Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 2014.
Physical Description
xxx, 377 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
Summary
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. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial differences and by emphasizing as never before the nation's continguous land borders and their patrols.
Contents
- Introduction : Illegal aliens : a problem of law and history
- The regime of quotas and papers
- The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and the reconstruction of race in immigration law
- Deportation policy and the making and unmaking of illegal aliens
- Migrants at the margins of law and nation
- From Colonial subject to undesirable alien : Filipino migration in the invisible empire
- Braceros, "wetbacks," and the national boundaries of class
- War, nationalism, and alien citizenship
- The World War II internment of Japanese Americans and the citizenship renunciation cases
- The Cold War Chinese immigration crisis and the confession cases
- Pluralism and nationalism in post-World War II immigration reform
- The liberal critique and reform of immigration policy
- Epilogue
- Appendix
- Notes
- Archival and other primary sources.