| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. By Mae M. Ngai. (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004. xx + 377 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.)

Moving beyond the telos of immigrant settlement, assimilation, and citizenship and the myth of "immigrant America," Mae Ngai's Impossible Subjects conceptualizes immigration not as a site for assessing the acceptability of the immigrants, but as a site for understanding the racialized economic, cultural, and political foundations of the United States. An outstanding sociolegal history, Impossible Subjects charts the historical origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society in the often forgotten period between the passage of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, which ushered in the most restrictive era in American immigration law, and the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which officially ended that era.

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