Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

Mae M. Ngai is the Lung Family professor of Asian American studies, professor of history, and co-director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University. Her area of expertise is in the field of migration studies and she teaches courses on related topics. Impossible Subjects, originally published in 2004, collected several prestigious awards, including the 2005 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians, the 2005 Lora Romero First Book Publication Award from the American Studies Association, the 2004 Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association, the 2004 Theodore Saloutos Book Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society, and others. Ngai has written three other books on immigration history and is currently working on another.

A “formidable pressure group” (47), the CJIC was an alliance of nativist groups that sought to exclude Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Mexican immigrants. They argued that these groups were not assimilable into American society and should be excluded from citizenship. They pushed lawmakers to embed racial hierarchies into immigration law. Additionally, the group lobbied for numerical restrictions on Mexican immigrants. Repeatedly, they described illegal immigrants as vicious and criminal, contributing to a racialized and negative