Ngai, Mae M.

OUR SYNOPSIS: Mae M. Ngai illuminates the creation and problematization of illegal immigration and the “illegal alien” as key processes of defining the nation in the twentieth century United States. She focuses on the period 1924 to 1965, in which restrictive national origins quotas regulated U.S. immigration. She argues, “The regime of immigration restriction remapped the nation in two important ways. First, it drew a new ethnic and racial map based on new categories and hierarchies of difference. Second, and in a different register, it articulated a new sense of territoriality, which was marked by unprecedented awareness and state surveillance of the nation’s contiguous land borders.” (3) She shows the while the 1924 legislation divided European prospective immigrants were divided into ethnic groups, their Mexican and Asian counterparts were racialized as “unassimilable” and “alien.” (8) This legislation created “illegal aliens” within U.S. borders, threatening their deportation. Temporary economic migrants, especially laborers from Mexico and the Philippines, occupied a comparable status of non-belonging. After World War II, Asian citizenship in the U.S. was gradually reconstructed following a long history of exclusion and oppression.