Recommendations from our site
“Impossible Subjects is a classic text, it was the first book that really demonstrated the relationship between racist ideas and immigration restrictions in the United States. She shows that notions of citizenship and belonging are not things that are fixed, but rather are created through media, through discourses in a society, and then get put in place through laws. She argues that the laws both reflect the views of a particular time, but then also create and bring into being the exclusions and categories of white and nonwhite that were inchoate before they were put into law. The book focuses on the early period of US immigration law, but the histories that she is tracing from the 1920s are still affecting us today. That 1924 law gets revised in 1952, and then again in 1965. That is still the immigration law that we have in the United States.” Read more...
The best books on Immigration and Race
Reece Jones, Social Scientist
“Ngai explores the origins of the concept of the ‘illegal alien’ in the United States.” Read more...
“Ngai takes the story into the 20th century, and shows how the idea of the illegal migrant was invented, along with the construction of Mexican-Americans as illegals.” Read more...
The best books on Race and the Law
Kenneth W. Mack, Historian
