Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
More books in the category:
United States Immigration
by: Mae M. Ngai
Topics include: using paper names, imported colonialism, racial ineligibility, confession program, migrant nationalism, derivative citizens, nonquota admission, nonquota immigration, administrative law reform, immigration reform movement, wetback problem, many braceros, excludable classes, alien citizenship, immigration committee, bracero labor, migratory farm labor, deportation policy, nonquota immigrants, national origins quota system, project attorney, southwestern agriculture, repatriation movement, loyalty questionnaire, national origins system
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The United States has been tainted by a long history of exclusion, a blight on the nation's democratic tradition that was only recently removed with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965. Such a narrative not only reaffirms the myth of American universalism, but also consistently fails to produce any new critical knowledge about U.S. immigration and U.S. history. Impossible Subjects differs from these other works of immigration history in this important respect: it proceeds with the conviction that the United States was never a "nation of immigrants." ... By suggesting that the making of modern America rested on the exclusion of nonwhites from the geographical and ideological borders of the nation during this regime of restriction, the book argues against the normative telos of immigrant settlement, assimilation, and citizenship as the defining narrative of American history, a narrative that is confined to the nation-state and that invariably reproduces American exceptionalism.
Reviews:
Impossible Subjects offers an important contribution to U.S. histories of race, citizenship, and immigration. This stunning history of U.S. immigration policy dispels the liberal rhetoric that underlies popular notions of immigrant America, as it establishes the designation of Asians and Mexicans as perpetually racial others. Everyone in the field of race and immigration should read this thought provoking book.
the best of recent books on the 20th-century American history of immigration….positive laws concerning immigration policy have constructed the category of "illegal aliens" from Mexico, and the implementation of the laws by Border Patrols and INS has reinforced the labeling of racially alien immigrants. She bases her analysis on the critical legal theory which suggests that laws constitute social formations. Her usage of the new legal theory in her inquiry into the American immigration history is highly excellent and persuasive.
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