Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

“In a liberal society that values the moral and legal equality of all persons, the undocumented are impossible subjects, persons whose presence is a social reality yet a legal impossibility.”

Ngai argues that immigration policies have created illegal aliens. In criminalizing not only the entry but the person, the government can only resolve the situation via the legalization of their status or their deportation. Ngai titles her study for these “impossible subjects,” arguing that this problem is government-made and essentially artificial.

“Immigration policy is constitutive of Americans’ understanding of national membership and citizenship, drawing lines of exclusion and inclusion that articulate a desired composition—imagined if not necessarily realized—of the nation.”

Throughout US history, there have been Racial Hierarchies in US Immigration Law, with some ethnic groups, such as northern Europeans, favored and others, such as Chinese, excluded. Those exclusions extend to American citizens, born in the country, who are considered foreign because of their race. In the 1920s, immigration polices sought to ensure the maintenance of a white majority.

“[T]hese racial formations produced ‘alien citizens’—Asian Americans and Mexican Americans born in the United States with formal U.S. citizenship but who remained alien in the eyes of the nation.”

When Asian immigrants were excluded legally from citizenship in the US because they were unassimilable, that taint extended to their children. Likewise, Mexican immigrants were branded as criminals because some entered illegally. That association was racial and extended to all Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans, reflecting Illegal Aliens in Law and the American Imagination.