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Reviewed by John Nieto-Phillips | Book Review | The Indiana Magazine of History, 105.1 | The History Cooperative
105.1  
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March, 2009
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Reviews

Impossible Subjects
Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

By Mae M. Ngai
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. Pp. xix, 377. Figures, tables, illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. Clothbound, $30.00; paperbound, $24.95.)

Impossible Subjects is a landmark study of twentieth-century U.S. immigration. Since its publication, the book has won more than a half-dozen major prizes, including the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Award. Deservedly praised as ambitious and innovative, Impossible Subjects examines the creation of the legal categories and bureaucratic mechanisms that distinguished "citizens" from "aliens"—integral members of the national polity from "subjects" living at its margins. 1
      The book retraces the evolution of national laws, rulings, policies, and structures from the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, known for its restrictive national quotas, to the more permissive 1965 Hart-Celler Act. Historians have pointed to Hart-Celler as one of the foremost achievements of post-war liberalism. The law dispensed with racial and national preferences, something President Lyndon B. John-son called "a deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice," and it opened the nation's doors to increasing numbers of immigrants from Latin America, Africa, and Asia (p. 259). . . .
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