Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America - Updated Edition (Politics and Society in Modern America, 105)

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 shaped ideas and practices about citizenship, race, and state authority in the twentieth century. Mae Ngai offers a close reading of the legal regime of restriction that commenced in the 1920s―its statutory architecture, judicial genealogies, administrative enforcement, differential treatment of European and non-European migrants, and long-term effects. She shows that immigration restriction, particularly national-origin and numerical quotas, remapped America both by creating new categories of racial difference and by emphasizing as never before the nation's contiguous land borders and their patrol.

• A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920
• A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
• Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
• White by Law 10th Anniversary Edition: The Legal Construction of Race (Critical America)
• The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Politics and Society in Modern America)
• Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente
• A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
• How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (American Crossroads)
• Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution
• Malcolm X: The Last Speeches (Malcolm X Speeches & Writings)