Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (review)

This ambitious work on U.S. immigration policy embraces the epoch between passage of the National Origins Act of 1924 and enactment of the Immigration Act of 1965. The former law established quotas that discriminated against European peoples (the Chinese and other Asians were already excluded) whom the U.S. deemed undesirable, while the Immigration Act of 1965 permitted the admission of foreigners from all nations, though each country had a quota of 20,000.

Mae M. Ngai seeks answers to several questions. Why is it, the author asks, that the posture that the United States has taken on illegal immigration fluctuated over the years? What role has race played in the immigration debate? Can there be a resolution to the immigration conundrum?

In pursuit of these questions, Ngai breaks down Impossible Subjects into an introduction and four parts. Respectively, these parts discuss immigration policies during the 1920s and the manner that nationality and race influenced them; the reliance on and exploitation of Mexican and Filipino labor during the 1920s and 1930s (through an arrangement Ngai labels "imported colonialism"); the treatment of Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans during the World War II years and the early Cold War era; and the efforts undertaken during the 1950s and early 1960s to modernize the nation's immigration policy.

For Ngai, the stance that Americans have adopted on immigration since passage of the National Origins Act of 1924 has ever been in flux, with economics influencing societal sentiments. During the 1920s through the 1950s, Americans thought Mexicans and Filipinos to be undesirable groups and thus subject to exclusion from legal immigration, yet Congress negotiated the Bracero program with Mexico while agricultural concerns in the southwestern United States continued their reliance on illegal labor. Similarly, writes Ngai, definitions of race changed depending on historical circumstances at hand, and so immigrants of color could at times be permitted to enter the country legally, at others not. Excluded by Congress in 1882, for example, some Chinese found refuge in the United States during World War II when China became an ally, then faced suspicions of citizenship and loyalty after the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. The Immigration Act of 1965 sought to eliminate the old quotas based on race or nationality, but it hardly resolved the problem of illegal immigrants. The desire for Mexican labor, for instance, lured people in greater numbers than the quota for Mexico permitted.

Without question, this is a significant addition to the scholarship on immigration, explaining effectively how difficult it is to control the immigration laws when economics push and pull people across borders. Impossible Subjects is grounded on solid primary research and extensive use of the existing literature on the topic. It is an example of multicultural history at its best, interweaving the experiences of Americans, Europeans, Latin Americans, and Asians. It is worthy of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, which it earned in 2005.