Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

World War II constituted a “watershed in the history of Asian Americans” (169), as the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943 and Japanese Americans were interned in camps from 1942 through 1945. Even for Asian Americans born in the US, a century of exclusion had rendered them foreign. The Japanese-American renunciation of citizenship cases and Chinese confession cases “reveal the malleability of citizenship as a legal-status and as a political-subject identity” (170). The post-war period would begin a transformation in the status of Asian Americans.

Migrant and diasporic communities have always kept ties to countries of origin. This “migrant nationalism” (170) has at times been supported by Americans. In wartime, however, there is no such support or toleration. While wars have sometimes provided opportunities for immigrants to prove their loyalty to the US, groups that are the same ethnicity as enemy countries have been called upon to abandon cultural practices. Ngai cites the experience of German Americans during World War I. The opposition to foreigners in the US during that War led to the restrictionist immigration laws of the 1920s.

Prior to World War II, ethnic Chinese and Japanese persons in the US had ethnic presses and considered their support of home countries as complementary to their support of the US.