On Impossible Subjects

This is a really, really tough read; very legalistic and meandering. Yet, there’s a certain simplicity that makes the text beautiful in an almost mathematical sense. Basically, Ngai argues that illegal immigrants must not be simply understood as those lacking citizenship, but an entire “caste” outside of both legal rights and social legitimacy. The whole “illegal immigration” regime effectively began in 1924 with the passing of the Johnson-Reed Act. Although there were precedents to the existence of illegal immigration to the US, thanks in large part to the Chinese Exclusion Act, “illegal” immigration effectively did not exist until Congress put quotas based on national origin in place. In doing so, countries with lower quotas were stigmatized because inhabitants from those areas had little chance of being accepted for immigrating to the United States. Some countries, like Chinese, Japan, Siam (Thailand), and India were not permitted to send any people to the US, while most visas went to the British, Germans, Swedish, etc.

As a result of quotas based on national origin, groups who were stigmatized were more likely to be painted as illegal. Wwhether they were or illegal or not is a different question—an estimated 25% of Chinese in the US were illegal in the 1950s, while the vast majority of Japanese were not, but this didn’t stop Americans from depicting them all as illegal. Yet, there are some interesting cases here. For instance, Filipinos were stigmatized, but they were also American “nationals” (effectively colonized subjects that had rights to migrate to the mainland); while Mexicans were permitted, for the most part, because no quotas were put in place for inhabitants of the western hemisphere—this was in large part due to corporate lobbying in the West and Southwest, where Mexicans were a necessary to agricultural labor. For Mexicans, they were not recognized as being “illegal” until the founding of the Border Patrol, which had legal jurisdiction to detain any “alien” without a warrant anywhere in the country. Fortunately, they did not flex that jurisdictions, choosing to stay within 100 miles of the border, but determining who was an “alien” was rooted nearly entirely in racial profiling.

At the end of the day, the Johnson-Reed Act did far more than limit immigration, it built new racial categories and reorganized hierarchies in the United States while maximizing American surveillance of its territory. Really solid piece of scholarship.