| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to JAH online. About 241 words from this article are provided below; about 368 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the Organization of American Historians, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a member of the Organization of American Historians, you can:: • Join the OAH and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the Journal of American History.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two-hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of American History (86.1-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Journal of American History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. By Mae M. Ngai. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. xxii, 377 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-691-07471-2.)
Impossible Subjects examines the largely neglected decades between the passage of the restrictive Immigration Act of 1924 and the more liberal Immigration Act of 1965. But it goes far beyond just filling a gap in existing scholarship. In this book, Mae M. Ngai contends that twentieth-century American immigration law and policy created illegal aliens and then racialized them in a manner that had grave implications for non-European immigrants and their descendants.	1
The first two sections of Ngai's study deal directly with the Immigration Act of 1924 and its aftermath. Designed to limit southern and eastern European immigration, the act arranged the world into a hierarchy of desirable and undesirable nationalities and races but still categorized all Europeans as white. The new law also imposed a regimen of passports and paperwork on the Western Hemisphere immigrants who had once moved freely across America's borders. This emphasis on borders reflected a post–Versailles Treaty world of nation-states jealously guarding their sovereignty; it also made crossing the border without permission a criminal act at the very moment that increased Mexican immigration was creating new racial tensions in the West and Southwest. Ngai argues that this combination helped white Americans justify excluding Mexicans and Mexican Americans from full membership and equal rights in U.S. society.	. . .

There are about 368 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.