Impossible Subjects

Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

By: Mae M. Ngai

Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller

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 US immigration policy - a process that profoundly shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the 20th 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.

Ngai's analysis is based on extensive archival research, including previously unstudied records of the US Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service. Contributing to American history, legal history, and ethnic studies, Impossible Subjects is a major reconsideration of US immigration in the 20th century.

©2004 Princeton University Press (P)2019 Tantor

Critic reviews

"[A] deeply stimulating work... Ngai's undeniable premise - as pertinent today as ever - is that the lawfully regulated part of our immigration system is only the tip of the iceberg." (Tamar Jacoby, Los Angeles Times Book Review)

Great

Good book worth a listen download it ok bye bye see ya thanks for the great story

Excellent introduction to USA immigration

Focus is on the period from the end of open immigration (1924) to the immigration reform act of 1965. Author explains objectives of policies and consequences, anticipated and unanticipated. World War I and then II left the USA as a global superpower and forever changed the environment for USA immigration law. I will read a second time.

Monotoned, boring dissertation of an important perspective.

Read this book with a sociology dictionary. I really wanted to like this book. This is an academic dissertation where the author misses the opportunity to relay the very important historical arguments of the book by the over use of series after series of overly complex, overly precise phrases. This prevents the reader/listener from fully engaging to understand, accept or even disagree because the unnecessarily complex language forces the average reader to constantly go back and review paragraphs for clear understanding. Although the phrasing is academic and overly complex and the delivery is monotoned and disengaged, the content is compelling and eye opening.