Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

“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.

“Political theorists and other scholars have debated whether liberalism’s commitment to the irreducible equal worth of all human beings can accommodate nationalism’s right to exclude.”

Congress has the power to write immigration policy and can impose rules on immigrants that would be unacceptable for citizens. Ngai highlights the inconsistency of that nationalistic prerogative with the founding ideals of the US. The Declaration of Independence asserts that all have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“[W]hite Americans and immigrants from Europe have ‘national origins,’ that is, they may be identified by the country of their birth or their ancestors’ birth. But, the ‘colored races’ were imagined as having no country of origin. They lay outside the concept of nationality and therefore, citizenship.”

With such reasoning, racial hierarchies were embedded in US immigration laws. In the case of the 1924 act, immigration for all but Europe and the Western Hemisphere became almost impossible legally.

“The Quota Board assumed that even if nationalities combined through intermarriage, they did not mix but remained discrete, unalloyed parts in descendants that could be tallied as fractional equivalents.”

Tasked with determining the ethnic makeup of the US population at a point in time, the Quota Board made unfounded assumptions. All such assumptions favored northern Europeans. This flawed data became the basis for the allocation of quotas required by the 1924 Immigration Act.

“Mexicans would become racialized aliens in the United States in large part by their illegal presence in the region that was once Mexico.”

Ngai emphasizes that illegal aliens are a creation of law. Numerical quotas had the predictable result of illegal immigration. The reach of the state then extended from patrolling borders to inland areas because the mere presence of undocumented persons was a crime.

“Because illegal entry is concomitant of restrictive immigration policy, the quota laws stimulated the production of illegal aliens and introduced that problem into the internal spaces of the nation.”

Ngai emphasizes that illegal aliens are a creation of law. Numerical quotas had the predictable result of illegal immigration. The reach of the state then extended from patrolling borders to inland areas because the mere presence of undocumented persons was a crime.

“Yet their proposed solutions, such as compulsory alien registration and mass deportation, were problematic exactly because undocumented immigrants were so like other Americans.”

Speaking of the restrictionists, Ngai highlights the disconnect between abstract calls for the expulsion of illegal immigrants and the reality of human beings enmeshed in communities. While the proposals of restrictionists contributed to the presence of Racial Hierarchies in US Immigration Law, they were unrealistic. It was not feasible nor desirable to deport all undocumented persons.

“Nearly 20 percent of the Mexican population in the United States returned to Mexico in the early years of the Depression. The repatriation of Mexicans was a racial expulsion program exceeded in scale only by the Native American Indian removals of the nineteenth century.”

When jobs became scarce in the 1930s, white Americans sought the removal of ethnic Mexicans. Ngai explains that all Mexicans, whether citizens, legal or illegal aliens, were not accepted as assimilable Americans. The association with criminality, a product of the restrictions on entry, tainted all in the American imagination and resulted in the expulsion of approximately 400,000 persons.

“Filipinos’ ‘womanlessness’ thus became associated with the specter of race-mixing. But if Filipinos frequented the dance halls, relatively few Filipinos married white women.”

Most Filipinos brought to work in the 1920s were male. Ngai explains that their ability to assimilate to western ways in their form of dress, religion, and recreation made white Americans reject them and behave violently toward them. There was special condemnation for their dating white women and states made mixed marriages illegal. As a result of racial hierarchies in US immigration law, Filipinos were deemed unassimilable.

“Because the minimum quota for all countries under the Immigration Act of 1924 was one hundred, the Philippine quota was a gratuitous gesture meant to degrade Filipinos to a status something short of nationhood, their American tutelage placing them just barely above the fully excludable Asiatic races.”

Those seeking to rid the US of Filipinos advocated for Filipino independence. Once the Philippines was no longer a US possession, its citizens were subject to exclusive immigration laws. Setting a quota of 50, the US exposed the presence of racial hierarchies in immigration law.

“It was as though the entire experience of Filipino migration during the first half of the century was willfully forgotten by a public determined to erase the colonial past from the American imagination.”

There were clear contradictions between the founding ideals of the US and the holding of colonial possessions. When the Philippines was granted independence, governmental programs sought to repatriate those in the US. While most Filipinos were not repatriated, they were virtually invisible in the US. Their presence and the role of colonialism was not acknowledged.

“The formation of the migratory agricultural workforce was perhaps the central element in the broader process of modern Mexican racial formation in the United States.”

In the 1920s, large agribusinesses relied upon Mexican labor. However, via the imposition of obstacles to legal migration, these businesses hired undocumented workers. Such workers were excluded from social and political life and were easily exploited because of that exclusion.

“The exclusion of the agricultural proletariat from the legal definition of ‘worker’ […] was perhaps the single greatest guarantee that agribusiness would continue to have free rein over its workforce and that the South and Southwest would remain racialized, colonial-type backwaters of the nation.”

Agricultural workers were excluded from the protections of the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Given that Mexicans, especially undocumented ones, were associated with agricultural labor, protections in law were denied and trade unions did not work to organize these workers. As a result, they were exploited to the benefit of agribusinesses.

“The INS officially opposed all plans that ‘plac[ed] a premium upon illegal entry,’ but in fact the agency was already complicit in the practice.”

Given the economic demand for Mexican labor in agriculture, the INS complied in practices that won legal status for illegal workers. The agency alternated that approach with raids and deportations. It preferred the growers to use contract labor in the Bracero Program (See: Index of Terms) but could not eliminate illegal workers.

“For Asian Americans born in the United States, birthright citizenship held certain tangible benefits (the right to be present, to own land, etc.) yet remained subject to enormous cultural denial by the mainstream of American society, which regarded ‘Asian’ and ‘American citizen’ as mutually exclusive concepts.”

Due to Racial Hierarchies in US Immigration Law, American citizens who were the descendants of excluded racial groups were considered foreign. Citizens were at times equated with immigrants, legal or illegal. During World War II, the refusal to accept Japanese Americans as citizens resulted in their internment in camps.

“The government’s wartime policy toward Japanese Americans diverged sharply from its views and treatment of persons of German and Italian descent, which was based on individual selection and investigation.”

Since German and Italian Americans and immigrants were considered white and were assimilated into American culture, they were not all considered disloyal during World War II. Concerning cases were investigated individually. In contrast, all Japanese Americans were assumed disloyal and were therefore evacuated from their homes on the West Coast. There is no clearer proof of the Americans’ unwillingness to accept Asian Americans as citizens at this time.

“The problem with the overemphasis on intimidation and coercion is that it casts the renunciants as victims without individual agency. It constructs them as people whose actions were controlled by others […] It also shifts the blame to other Japanese and reproduces stereotypes about Japanese culture as extremist.”

Speaking about the reasons that Japanese Americans renounced their citizenship during World War II, Ngai questions the conventional wisdom that most were pressured by others in the camp or by families to do so—reasoning that was cited in legal arguments to reinstate citizenship. While it might have played some role, Ngai emphasizes the pull of dual loyalties for most, the desire to keep their families together, and the anger toward the US for imprisoning them.

“In a few short years the dominant image of Chinese lurched from despised oriental ‘other’ to wartime ally to dangerous Communist threat.”

The fate of Chinese immigrants was impacted by the changing relationship with China. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed during World War II when the countries were aligned. However, as the Cold War developed, China was once again an enemy and the INS worked to reduce Chinese immigration.

“The courts’ discharge papers in these cases created documentation of native-birth citizenship where none had previously existed. Chinese immigrants thus invented a system of illegal entry built entirely upon a paper trail derived from the state’s efforts to enforce exclusion.”

In the early decades of the 20th century, young men arriving from China claimed to have been born in the US. Unable to verify these claims, many were turned away but then filed claims in court. Accepting oral testimony, the federal courts ruled favorably in a majority of these cases. Later, those deemed American could seek to bring family members to the US.

“Others could come only if quotas under the first three preferences were not filled. The policy thus established a new set of norms of desirability based on educational level, skill, and familial ties to Americans.”

The 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act gave preference to immigrants with special skills needed in the US and to relatives of those in the US. These preferences would be retained in the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, reflecting The Continuities in US Immigration Policy. They did not acknowledge the need for low-wage workers and therefore assured illegal immigration.

“These statements were in part a defensive response to conservatives’ claims that reformers wanted to recklessly abandon all controls on immigration. But in fact liberals sought to open the door but a crack.”

Stressing The Continuities in US Immigration Policy, Ngai notes that liberal reformers did not want to eradicate immigration quotas­—they simply wanted to change the allocation to ensure equality and remove the taint of racism from them.

“But by limiting the meaning of ‘restriction’ to the national origins system, they obscured from view the law’s other restrictive provisions: the numerical ceiling (which […] was judged severe by economists and demographers) and the imposition of quotas on Western Hemisphere immigration.”

The 1965 Immigration Act not only maintained quotas but added quotas to the Western Hemisphere where there had previously been none. The 1965 act thus demonstrated both The Continuities in US Immigration Policy and assured the creation of Illegal Aliens in Law and the American Imagination. The quotas were unrealistic, guaranteeing illegal immigration.