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 designed ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state power in the twentieth century.

Mae Ngai gives an in depth reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s-its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of about Out of the question Topics: Illegal Aliens as well as the Building of Contemporary America Euro and non-European migrants, and long-term results. In well-drawn historical portraits, Ngai peoples her study with the Filipinos, Mexicans, Japanese, and Chinese language who comprised, variously, unlawful aliens, alien people, colonial topics, and imported agreement workers. She shows that immigration restriction, especially national-origin and numerical quotas, re-mapped the nation both by creating fresh categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation’s contiguous land edges and their patrol. This yielded the ‘unlawful alien,’ a new legal and politics subject whose inclusion in the nation was a public reality but a legal impossibility-a subject without rights and excluded from citizenship. Questions of fundamental legal position created new difficulties for liberal democratic culture and have straight informed the politics of multiculturalism and national belonging in our time.

Ngai’s analysis is dependant on extensive archival study, including previously unstudied information of the U.S. Boundary Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Support. Contributing to American history, legal background, and ethnic research, Impossible Subjects is definitely a major reconsideration of U.S. immigration in the twentieth century.