Immigration Policies and the Rise of Islamaphobia: Impossible Subjects by Mae Ngai

This week we read Impossible Subjects by Mae Ngai to cover the topic “Immigration Policies and the Rise of Islamaphobia.” While the book did not explicitly focus on the latter half of the topic, it offered a rich and nuanced discussion of immigration policy and how it repeatedly has been used to limit groups because of race and religion.

Ngai’s book might prove difficult for novice historians to latch onto (for notes, see here), but the book’s introduction explains its argument to us carefully and with nuance.  Ngai explains that during the twentieth century, immigration policy evolved to appear more color-blind, but in reality immigration shaped how Americans understand race.  Ngai is able to make these arguments because of the particularly impressive range of sources she uses – the book examines oral histories from many different immigrant communities, the papers of various labor and social organizations, immigration enforcement records, and politicians’ papers.  These sources enable Ngai to examine immigration from a number of perspectives, including the ways state policy interacted directly in immigrants’ lives.

Throughout the book, Ngai discusses the key immigration laws shaping government treatment of those entering the country, as well as court cases that established their eligibility for citizenship.  In the early twentieth century, American social scientists concerned with the urban living conditions of central and eastern European immigrants (often Jews and Catholics) lobbied for restrictions on immigration.  At this time, Chinese and Japanese immigrants had already been banned from the country, despite an active effort by Japanese immigrants to take up farming and assimilate into American life; court rulings further clarified that Asians could only become citizens under the most limited circumstances. Mexican workers were rarely the focus of reform efforts, though critics raised occasional concerns about their supposedly filthy living conditions.  These realities shaped the Immigration Act of 1924, which was the first effort to build a comprehensive immigration policy around restriction. The law created a quota system based on a host country’s proportion of America’s population in the 1890 census, a year in the distant past that barred immigrants from many European nations.  Interestingly to contemporary readers, this 1924 law did not place a cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere.

Ngai stresses that by limiting immigration, the 1924 law created the category of illegal alien – despite the law, many people entered the country illegally and were an undeniable presence in American society yet had no way to formally justify that presence.  The new policy was difficult to enforce, as immigration officials found it hard to differentiate between illegal immigrants and American citizens because the two groups were so closely intertwined with one another. While the letter of the law might have made it seem like European immigrants would become the quintessential illegal immigrants, very soon after the law’s passage Mexicans became subject of the most intense scrutiny.  European immigration fell dramatically in the late 1920s because of worldwide depression and the fact that it was easy for European immigrants to move to Canada for a few years and then immigrate across the Canadian border in line with formal procedure.  European immigrants also benefitted from policies that encouraged white illegal immigrants the country to apply to legally change their immigration status, as reformers were sympathetic to their family and community ties that made them appear a part of the broader American society and encourage bureaucrats to find ways to prevent them avoid deportation. While white immigrants were able to increasingly challenge their perception as illegal immigrants, these routes were not open to Mexican immigrants who were not even subject to a quota system.  However, Mexican workers moved irregularly across the border – many traveled across the border at informal crossings or did not keep their immigration paperwork on them – shaping popular ideas that Mexican immigrants arrived illegally, and furthre intensifying police scrutiny of their communities. While European immigrants increasingly blended into American society through family and community ties, segregation forced Mexicans out of white communities and spaces; because of their standing outside of white American society, few bureaucrats were sympathetic to Mexicans’ efforts to change their formal immigration status through the paperwork process they had made available to white illegal immigrants.

While the Immigration Act of 1924 lies at the heart of Ngai’s study, the book also examines the many amendments Congress made over the ensuing decades.  Following World War II, the country tried to form new policy in large part because of Cold War strategies that demanded greater outreach with communities around the world that still tried to maintain immigration for white, European immigrants.  In the aftermath of the war, Congress passed laws to allow more refugees from war-torn Europe, but these still attempted to deny entrance to Jews and Catholics. Laws designed to win the approval of nationalist Chinese forces and other Asian allies carved out extremely small quotas for these nations so the US could claim to be opening its borders to all nations while in reality barely admitting any Asian immigrants.  During the Cold War the US also began its “bracero” program that recruited Mexican agricultural workers to southwestern industrial farms.  This program was hated by white American workers who saw it as depressing wages, while at the same time the program encouraged illegal immigration because more Mexicans wanted to serve as braceros than the program permitted. The program lost support during the late 1950s after numerous journalists documented the abusive conditions braceros faced on American farms.  

Although Ngai’s history ostensibly ends with the passage of new immigration legislation in 1965, her research is heavily engaged with current policy.  The 1965 law forms the basis of our current system and despite it serving as the conclusion to the book, Ngai effectively uses it to examine its intended and unintended consequences. Through the law, American reformers attempted to emphasize the “fairness” of policy by bringing all countries into a quota system – including the Western Hemisphere countries like Mexico. However, this seemed objectively short-sighted, as it set the Mexican quota at 20,000, far lower than the 200,000 cap for bracero workers that was itself insufficient.  Since 1965, illegal Mexican immigration has expanded dramatically, largely as a result of the parameters of this law. While the law allowed Asian and African immigration to rise dramatically, this was an unintended consequence rather than an effort to craft a more liberal policy – Ngai demonstrates that the law’s authors didn’t foresee the new system of family preferences resulting in ongoing waves of new immigrants to the US. 

Although an improvement, the problems Ngai highlights in the 1965 law suggest more could and should be done to form a cohesive, fair immigration policy. Unfortunately, most recent immigration policy proposals have drawn on the worst impulses of American history. The Trump administration’s immigration policy has included proposals to build physical walls to limit immigration; Ngai proposed other, alternative policies while also casting doubt on the idea that illegal immigrants were in some way acting as foreign agents since most simply come on behalf of their families to make better lives on an individual level.  She suggests the country does not necessarily have to embrace open borders, but could instead focus on macro-economic economic push factors by changing trade and aid policies.  The country could also expand NAFTA to operate more like the European Union and allow Mexican workers easy access to the country’s labor market. Unlike aggressive policing, which has done little actually address the causes of illegal immigration and instead seems built around the country’s historic racial fears, other policies could offer a less invasive and potentially more productive solution to illegal immigration that properly frames it as a civil rather than criminal problem.