In Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects, the emergence of illegal immigration as the central problem of American immigration policy constructed a new figure in immigration discourse – the “illegal alien.” Beginning with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, Ngai traces immigration policy and the lines of illegal and legal status that have come to define not only immigration law, but also the development of twentieth-century American ideas and practices surrounding nationality, citizenship, and race. The implementation of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in 1924 is especially important to Ngai’s thesis in that it marks a shift from a previous era of open immigration from Europe to an era of immigration restriction. The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act set numerical quotas for immigrants entering the United States based on national origin, the first of its kind. The restriction limitations that the law put in place also established a quota system that classified the world’s population (and immigrants) according to nationality and race. Ngai argues that although not fully explicit, the law essentially created a ranking of these populations “into a hierarchy of desirability for admission into the United States” (Ngai, 17). The use of numerical restrictions as well as the basis of these restrictions on nationality marked a shift in immigration policy from a previous policy of “regulation.” The new immigration policy of “restriction” thus characterized a new comprehensive immigration law provided grounds for a legal racialization of certain immigrant groups, as discrimination against ethnic groups of certain nationalities were subject to greater levels of restriction. Two groups that were particularly affected by high levels of discrimination and restriction were Asian and Latino immigrant communities, which Ngai argues, were figured as “foreign and unassimilable” in American discourse (Ngai 8). Assimilation, a traditional tenet for liberal democratic society, became an impossibility for many of these marginalized communities, as they remained “alien” in the eyes of the “American identity”, regardless of legal citizenship. Going further, even as America increasingly defined itself based on the myth of “immigrant America,” immigrant populations of certain countries or racialization, existed outside of formal membership and belonging. Assimilation, which was posed as impossible for racialized immigrant groups would increasingly become an impossibility to “assimilate” to white society. Rather, American society was increasingly constructed around a racial identity of whiteness that defined lines of inclusion and exclusion based on race. Immigration policy, thus, became tied to a broader and more comprehensive “race policy” that no longer saw distinctions along black and white, but rather the inclusion of Mexicans from the south after World War I. The 1920s marked a shift not only in the “regulation” of immigrant populations, but also emergence of race and racial desirability as a factor in immigration policy. Ngai further writes, “modern racial ideology depended increasingly on the idea of complex cultural, national, and physical difference more than on simply biological hierarchy” (Ngai, 8).
The role of difference, which became constructed not only along racial lines, but also cultural and national lines is important to my thesis not only in terms of its emergence and institutionalization in racial ideology, but also in terms of how it has become increasingly called upon for regulation in immigration policy. The deployment of quota restrictions, for example, performs a similar organization of the immigrant into a statistical category. Once the immigrant is turned into a numerical figure, then the limits placed on these populations reduced to statistics becomes engaged in technologies of regulation. What this quota system also produced was a system of visa controls and the subsequent documentation of legal status. Proper documentation, for example, visa, became the means for entrance. Because visas were taken as the means of entry, the allotment of quotas based on nation origin and arguably, racial desirability implicated technologies of tracking and documentation into a similar racial ideology. With the emergence of the “illegal alien,” the new policy of restriction demanded multiple technologies for its tracking and enforcement. These technologies included the tracking of quotas and the surveillance of border entry points. Because immigrant populations were increasingly restricted, the border as a site was coupled with the management of the immigrant in the interior, producing a comprehensive immigrant policy on a national scale.
Furthermore, with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, the creation of the Border Patrol happened within the same decade, functioning as “a scouting organization and a pursuit organization” (Ngai, 56). This kind of regulation and border enforcement would form what would become the policy of “apprehension.” The focus on the interior rather than at the site of borders, which would come to define modern border enforcement and immigration policy, was evident in the area that the Border Patrol occupied. Ngai notes that the Border Patrol “did not operate ‘on the border line’ but as far as one hundred mile ‘back of the line’”(Ngai, 56). However, the area of enforcement that was given to Border patrol constituted the points of entry along the border, but also the interior space of the nation-state, collapsing the two into an indistinguishable space of management. The point of exclusion that the border as a physical space represented became indistinguishable from the space of inclusion that the interior of the United States represented. This becomes important to both sites of management, as they have evolved into contemporary exclusionary and inclusionary immigration policies. Furthermore, as Ngai notes, “the processes of defining and patrolling the border both encoded and generated racial ideas and practices which, in turn, produced different racialized spaces internal to the nation” ( 63-4).
The comparative model of border enforcement that Ngai offers is productive in terms of mapping the technologies that have come to regulate and organize the border and those who cross, both legally and socially. The new immigration policy based on one of restriction fundamentally defined how the nation would be racially and spatially managed. For as much as the racial hierarchy of immigrants was present, the increase in territoriality of the United States along its border became of equal importance during this shift. This remapping marked an increased awareness and as a result, surveillance of the state’s land borders. What became important in these shifts, which speaks to the future militarization of the border are the consequences that the new regime of restriction produced. First, it “remapped the ethno-racial contours of the nation,” constructing American identity around whiteness. Secondly, the regime of restriction also “generated illegal immigration as the central problem in immigration law” (Ngai, 17). Thirdly, the policy of restriction called upon new technologies of governmentality that would be preoccupied with the management of the state at the level of population control.
A second line of inquiry that Ngai pursues in Impossible Subjects is based on a question that she poses in the beginning of her text:
“What is it about the violation of the nation’s sovereign space that produces a different kind of illegal alien and a different valuation of the claims that he or she can make on society?” (2).
In the real and imagined category of the illegal alien, the question of rights and what kinds of claims that are afforded to this new figure become paramount in current debates surrounding immigration policy. Whereas the spatial organization and management of the illegal alien was paramount in the policy of restriction, Ngai argues that perhaps the outmost point of exclusion from national membership can be found in the juridical boundary that faced the illegal alien. Even if the illegal alien crosses the territorial boundary in the United States, the rights and national membership that are/are not afforded to the illegal alien brings up the relationship between citizenship and rights in American immigration discourse. For example, the current debate surrounding the protection of non-citizens under Fourteenth Amendment has been particularly important in reading the discourse surrounding immigration. The Fourteenth Amendment, which provides equal protection under the law, protects both citizens and non-citizens in civil society. Other than matters of admission and expulsions, or outside of the immigration domain, the law protects the civil rights non-citizens. However, the call to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment by members of the Republican party, especially Tea Party members becomes especially revealing toward the attitudes toward the rights of illegal immigrants. Ngai argues that the increasing centrality of sovereignty in immigration policy has allowed Congress to create, “as even the Supreme Court described, ‘rules that would be unacceptable if applied to citizens’” (Ngai, 12). Here the relationship between the social and legal status of the illegal alien becomes particularly complex. The civil rights of the illegal alien, although protected under the Fourteenth Amendment, still become marginalized and limited under other measures and protections created by Congress suggesting that the actual recognition and protection of the rights of non-citizens create a subject that not only exists outside of citizenship, but who is also without rights.
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