Mae M. Ngai

The various ways in which the law constructed and racialized “illegality” over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A telling example: in the mid-twentieth century, noncitizens who’d committed minor crimes but had lived in the US for decades could sometimes get relief from deportation by exiting the US and reentering—but only on the Canadian border; the option was not made available to Mexicans. Ngai’s organizing conceit is that the law both made “illegality” inevitable and yet excluded unlawful migrants from the category of people with rights, thus producing an “impossible” subject. I never really got that; it is obviously not at all impossible to have a category of rightsless people subject to the will of the state. It’s just truly awful.… (plus d'informations)

Ngai traces one family, starting with two Chinese immigrants who came as children and met in San Francisco. Christian missionaries adopted the girl; the boy worked for many people, including white families, ultimately building a transport business that depended on linking Chinese immigrants with white-owned shipping and railroads. Later, the family was heavily involved with immigration authorities in another way: several members worked for the US government, tracking down unlawful Chinese immigrants and purportedly distinguishing the truth-tellers from the liars (seemingly sometimes influenced by bribes). The family mostly held itself apart from Chinatown, living elsewhere and adopting “Western” clothes except in certain limited situations. Ngai suggests that this is a relatively typical story of how an immigrant family can advance financially and socially: by becoming an interface between other immigrants and the new society.… (plus d'informations)

In Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America, Maw M. Ngai “argues that illegal immigration is not anomalous but inherent to the regime of immigration restriction. Nor is it a side channel to the main stream of the nation’s history as a ‘nation of immigrants’” (pg. xxiv). Ngai organizes her book into four sections: the quota system and paper legality; immigration at the margins of law and nation; war, nationalism, and citizenship; and postwar immigration reform. Her subjects broadly alternate between Asian immigrants from Japan and China, with a section on the Philippines, and immigrants from Mexico. Further, Ngai employs a transnational approach, situating her work within recent borderlands scholarship.
In discussing restriction, Ngai writes, “Restriction not only marked a new regime in the nation’s immigration policy; [she] argue[s] that it was also deeply implicated in the development of twentieth-century American ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and the nation-state” (pg. 3). According to Ngai, the quota system “constructed a white American race, in which persons of European descent shared a common whiteness distinct from those deemed to be not white. In the construction of that whiteness, the legal boundaries of both white and nonwhite acquired sharper definition” (pg. 25). Discussing early twentieth century Americans’ fears over Filipino immigration, which they equated with a threat to job opportunities, Ngai writes, “The perception of widespread job competition was, in fact, fueled by longstanding racial animus towards Asiatics. The central element of this hostility was the ideology of white entitlement to the resources of the West” (pg. 109). Discussing migrant Mexican labor, Ngai “argues that immigration law and practices were central in shaping the modern political economy of the Southwest, one based on commercial agriculture, migratory farm labor, and the exclusion of Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans from the mainstream of American society” (pg. 128). Further, Ngai argues “that this transnational Mexican labor force, and especially its bracero and ‘wetback’ constituents, constituted a kind of ‘imported colonialism’ that was a legacy of the nineteenth-century American conquest of Mexico’s northern territories” (pg. 129). Ngai’s discussion of Japanese internment demonstrates the clash between the federal and state governments’ belief in immigrants’ duty to assimilate and Japanese-Americans’ desire to blend their culture with that of the United States (pg. 180). Their uncertain legal status further compounded this. While the United States relaxed its immigration restrictions on China during World War II, “Cold War politics and the sensationalized investigations against fraud reproduced racialized perceptions that all Chinese immigrants were illegal and dangerous. Confession legalized Chinese paper immigrants, but it did not necessarily bring them social legitimacy” (pg. 223). In her final section, Ngai argues “that the thinking that impelled immigration reform in the decades following World War II developed along a trajectory that combined liberal pluralism and nationalism” (pg. 230). She also examines the unforeseen consequences of those policies, such as the intellectual “brain drain” of the Third World.
Ngai draws upon the “intellectual and editorial interventions” of Gary Gerstle, author of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (pg. xvii). This links her to other historians, such as John Dower, who argued in War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War, that World War II was a race war, and to Lawrence Goldstone’s Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865-1903, which, like Ngai’s examples, examined the court cases that stripped non-white Americans of their rights or citizenship.… (plus d'informations)