Impossible Sub Subjects By Mae Ngai

Mae Ngais’s Impossible Subjects embraces the history of our modern term “illegal alien” by exploring the history behind immigration policy. The legal and social history explains the progression of the term, “illegal alien’s” throughout American life in the early 1900s and the 2000s. Ngai focuses on the era after the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924 and the reform of quotas by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 to the bracero programs and so on. Impossible Subjects already accepts that white privilege has already expanded in the early 1900s of American history, and she modifies her concentration on immigrants not accepted as the typical ‘white’ American but not yet of African descent either. Throughout Impossible Subjects the book is written in topological

Moreover, the need of state authorities to identify and distinguish between citizens, lawfully resident immigrants, and illegal aliens posed enforcement, political, and constitutional problems for the modern state. The illegal alien is thus an 'impossible subject,' a person who cannot be and a problem that cannot be solved." (Ngai

Enforcement is an essential element to the structure of an illegal immigrant. Ngai states that without the threat of deportation, there is no sense of “illegal” or “legal” immigrant (58). The need for enforcement has shifted immigration policy from an administrative task to being defined primarily by paperwork and other bureaucracies, into criminality. Ngai explained that the Border Patrol was actually part of the Department of Labor until 1940, and in addition to deportation, immigrants who returned by the United States may also have partaken in voluntary deportation. An exploration of the different ethnic and subjective meanings of these categories, in addition to their legal meaning, might complement Ngai’s points about different ethnic groups and ‘inclusivity’. Ngai tackles these arguments when inspecting the reasons that people in Japanese internment camps chose to relinquish their United States citizenship (Ngai 198-201). I found curiosity in the ways that deportation removes a “non presence” in their home communities. On the other hand, surrendering one’s citizenship requires the condition of acknowledgement that they are removing an “un-American” element, which happen to be themselves. Ngai reminds us, "As a sociolegal history, Impossible Subjects proceeds from the contention that law not only reflects society but constitutes it as well, that law normalizes