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Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America) by Ngai, Mae M. is a history book available to read on EtoBox.

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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. <p>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

Who reads Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)?

Author

Ngai, Mae M.

Publisher

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETO AND OXFORD

Published

2004

Language

EN

ISBN

9780691124292

Category

history

Subjects

Law, Political Science, Fiction

Rating

4 / 5 (641 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14