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

This book traces the origins from the ‘illegal alien’ in American law and society, explaining why and exactly how illegal migration became the central problem in U.S. immigration policy-a procedure that profoundly designed ideas and practices about citizenship, competition, and state expert in the twentieth century.

Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal program of restriction that commenced in the 1920s-its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of about Out of the question Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. In well-drawn historic portraits, Ngai peoples her study with the Filipinos, Mexicans, Japanese, and Chinese who comprised, variously, unlawful aliens, alien people, colonial subjects, and imported agreement workers. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, re-mapped the country both by creating fresh types of racial difference and by emphasizing as nothing you’ve seen prior the nation’s contiguous land borders and their patrol. This yielded the ‘unlawful alien,’ a fresh legal and politics subject whose inclusion in the nation was a social actuality but a legal impossibility-a subject without privileges and excluded from citizenship. Queries of fundamental legal status created new difficulties for liberal democratic culture and have directly informed the politics of multiculturalism and nationwide belonging in our time.

Ngai’s analysis is based on extensive archival analysis, including previously unstudied information from the U.S. Boundary Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Provider. Adding to American background, legal history, and ethnic research, Impossible Subjects is normally a significant reconsideration of U.S. immigration in the twentieth hundred years.