Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America-updated edition. Vol. 105. Princeton University Press, 2014.

Most historians neglect the time in history when America introduced immigration acts into American law and society. The periods between 1924 and 1965 were tumultuous to ‘Illegal Aliens’ and Mae Ngai’s book, “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America,” shines the light to this under-researched history. Mae Ngai unruffles historical archives to detail American history in the pre-modern era. Before 1924, America had an open-door policy that was welcoming to all persons. Old migrants or new, all were free to enter America and have a new lease of life. After 1965, however, the new immigrants had overflowed into America, and the country had to rethink its immigration policies. The United States altered the criteria of admission to the country, an act that by itself changed the stories of previously perceived national heroes into villains and unwelcome guests within the U.S. borders.

Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America documents an exciting historical account about the making of modern American society. The book goes back in history to relate the origins of illegal immigrants, the so-called illegal aliens as the book portends, in their struggle for civility and citizenship of their kind within America. The book dwells much on the immigration policies of the United States of America. It explores the origins of the term illegal alien as used within the American law context and the general society. Much of the content of the book dwells on how the illegal aliens became a problem in America, leading to the formulation of the United States of America Immigration Policy in the twentieth century.

At that time, much of the content of the immigration policy centered around race, state authority, and citizenship. Mae shows that during this period, the American society was remapped, both by the creation of new racial categories and the emphasis on border patrols and restriction of entry to American soil. Mae’s book has four major sections that detail the free entry era, the beginning of immigration policy reforms, and the post World War II immigration reforms in American society.

Impossible Subjects focus on American alien history does justice to the struggle for recognition and human rights dignity fought by the immigrants before attaining citizenship in the United States of America. The book analyses the change of American immigrants to aliens, and the defining moments in time when the American society shoved immigrants outside the cover of the law. Before this time, the book informs that American society was a lawful nation since it had no immigration laws to adhere to. Ngai investigates the formation of the possibility of a nation, starting by racial classification, a distinguishing factor that eventually became a metric for segregation.

The segment on the implementation of the new laws is imperative since it reports the move from one portrayal of the illegal alien to the next. To show how the redefinition of certain classes of migrants as expatriates worked, Ngai inspects specific groups of immigrants that were the most affected by the new immigration policies. The state repatriated Filipinos when they attempted to assimilate culturally, and the law also characterized Mexicans and Mexican Americans as illegal immigrants as well as compelling the Chinese to admit a misrepresentation framework constrained on them. Japanese Americans were also not spared by the wrath of the new legislation. America forced the Japanese to choose to either be Japanese or American. Even though these historical tales have common ground, Ngai gives a crisp point of view by treating the immigration tales with regards to the creation of lawlessness by class instead of a person’s dignity.

For instance, the Japanese-Americans were U.S. residents before the incorporation of the new immigration policies. However, without regard for humanity and dignity, the U.S. government decided to reclassify them as Japanese, yet at the same time nationalized the Italians and Germans as Americans. After discussing select unlawfully dispensed immigration cases, Ngai reverts to showcase a period when prejudice against illegal aliens came to an end. She takes note of the essential patriotism in the liberal declaration that tolerant pluralism was a thing that the predominant social orders did.

Pluralism turned into a political movement as opposed to a cultural marvel as the general public joined as one country, hegemon of all. The governing authority legislated the McCarran enactment as a Cold War device against socialism (p 238). In its barest form, the American nation became selective as to who the state will grant citizenship and who to become an illegal alien. America chose aliens, and not the other way round when immigrants chose America.

Mae Ngai reports the demonstration of 1965 as a significant point in the U.S. Immigrant history. She reports of the hegemonic discourse that was unfair as she portends that every country is unique in its dealings to the nation’s citizens and immigrants who come calling in search of habitation and asylum (p. 245). Her dramatic finale is presumably unreasonable, and it gets the book for a gentler conclusion than the story may warrant.

Ngai is an extremist turned researcher who writes with high spirited enthusiasm. Moreover, though it occasionally occurs, she is careful not to violate her sources. Nonetheless, she gives no quantifiable information, news sources, or anything to back up her proclamations. She references just an immediate statement from Dai-Ming Lee about how the government ought not to cover the entire race with one single brush. That appears to be a slender record for a case that racialized observations emerged from governmental issues and exposure. Pardon, however, can be extended to Mae Ngai as she has researched on unchartered terrain with little research materials available to make conclusive deliberations. All the same, this book is an excellent piece of work on American immigration history, a book worth reading by all persons seeking to understand present-day America by revisiting the past.