Since the beginning of the establishment of the United States, migration has been a central matter of discussion in the country. In 1886, the United States government accepted the nation of France’s gift of the Statue of Liberty, placing the figure in New York Harbor alongside a poem of acceptance and hospitality. However, over the past one hundred and twenty eight years, the country’s stance on immigration has drastically shifted from one of open arms to one of walls. This significant transformation in attitude has made United States immigration into a widely studied academic field, but with this, the question of whether this shift has changed the way the topic is studied arises. Mae Ngai, Kelly Lyte Hernandez, and Natalia Molina, three prominent academics of immigration have thoroughly studied and theorized on the issue of immigration, specifically on the turbulent period from 1924 to 1965. Written over a ten-year period, all three books focus on different angles of the topic of immigration, however, the works still present core commonalities about the study of immigration.
Whilst looking at the topic of immigration, Impossible Subjects, a renowned book written by Mae Ngai, a professor of Asian American Studies and History at Columbia University, specifically focuses on the creation and identity of the illegal alien and its relation to the 20th century immigration. Published in 2004, the book traces the origins of the illegal alien in both legal writings and social ideas, correspondingly mapping out the emergence of illegal immigration as an issue in the United States. Through her investigation, the author asserts that the formation of the illegal alien has prominently influenced the development of the ideas and practices of race and citizenship in America. Ngai begins her exploration of immigration in 1924, at the ratification of the Johnson-Reed Act. The law, placing restrictions on immigrant quantities and giving quotas for immigrants based on nationality, blatantly favored certain people over others based on their nationality and resulted in new emphasis on the country’s borders. These new restrictions, “…produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject, whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility–a subject barred from citizenship and without rights.” (Ngai, 4) Through the newly enacted restrictions, a different identity emerged, one in which a person is fully part of society in their daily lives; however, they cannot formally become part of the nation. Ngai writes on how this contradiction resulted in undocumented immigrants becoming impossible subjects, individuals who are contradictory in their very being.
The move from society viewing a person as an immigrant to an alien intensified the American idea of race. While most immigrants were categorized by their nation for quotas, Europeans were grouped as white. This distinction converted, “…the cultural nationalism of the late nineteenth century…into a nationalism based on race.” (24) The idea of America shifted from a cultural image to being grounded in race. With the shift in immigration approach, through both the law and the practice of border patrol, race was even further seen as an identifier and a reason for exclusion. Furthermore, immigration moved from being a government administrative issue, to a criminal one. By entering the country illegally, the immigrants were automatically viewed as all around criminals. A Immigration and Naturalization Service officer states, that due to an illegal immigrant’s method of entering the United States, “‘it is easier and sometimes appears even more necessary for him to break other laws since he considers himself to be an outcast, even an outlaw.’” (149) The restrictive immigration laws, criminal prosecution, border patrol practices and force of deportations all, “raised the border,” assisting in creating the illegal alien and new ideas of race. (68) Ngai uses examples of Filipino, Mexican, and Japanese immigrant histories from a variety of sources such as legal documents, oral histories, and newspapers, to illustrate both the contradiction of the illegal alien and the exclusion placed on them.
Six years after the publication of Impossible Subjects, Kelly Lytle Hernandez published Migra! A History of U.S. Border Patrol, concentrating on the role of border patrol in United States immigration. Lytle Hernandez, an associate professor in the Department of History at University of Los Angeles, focuses on immigration; however, she attacks it from a different angle, one of the law enforcer in the borderlands. Additionally, she argues that the development of the United States border patrol has shaped the contemporary ideas of race in the country. Social and legal forces, such as, “…dynamics of Anglo-American nativism, the power of national security, the problems of sovereignty, and the labor-control interests of capitalist economic development in the American southwest,” all have influenced Mexican immigration into the United States as well as the expansion of the border patrol. (Lytle Hernandez, 2) Compared to Mae Ngai’s work, Lytle Hernandez concretizes her arguments, looking solely at the realistic, on-the-ground aspects of immigration. The author actually makes point to reference preceding scholars in the subject, such as Peter Andreas, Daniel Tichenor, Kity Calavita, and Mae Ngai herself. While those scholars focused on internal forces like nativism and national agribusiness in relation to immigration law, Lytle Hernandez complicates those relations by arguing the borderlands, and the border patrol’s behavior in that area as influential to immigration.
Looking at the occurrences in the borderlands, the author naturally examined the Mexican government’s role in migration towards the United States. The government played a large role in the harsh immigration conduct on the border, actually working with the United States government as well as the border patrol officers. With the rise of Mexican nationalism, the government desired to keep their labor force in Mexico. This wish pushed the Mexican government into collaborating with the United States to continue its restrictive immigration policies. Through examining the border patrol’s history, it is clear that instead of focusing equally on all illegal immigrants, the authorities enforced their duties predominantly on Mexican immigrants. By the early 1940s, “…Border Patrol work in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands was almost entirely dedicated to the project of policing unsanctioned Mexican immigration.” (101) This extremely biased behavior aided in creating an extremely disparate view of race in the United States. The exclusivity of policing Mexican immigrants resulted in the population associating criminality with people of Mexican decent. The bracero program and Operation Wetback of the 1950s further associated immigrants with criminal behavior. The two programs shifted the focus of the border patrol from merely immigration to border crimes, such as drug smuggling, human trafficking and prostitution. Border patrol, which had been linked with immigrants, now were connected to catching criminals. The fact of immigrants crossing the border and the increased amount of crime in the borderlands led to the association.
The issue, “…began as a local interpretation of federal immigration laws, but it evolved upon the cross-border foundation of U.S. and Mexican collaboration during the 1940s. By the late 1960s, it had taken root in national initiatives for crime control and drug interdiction along the U.S.-Mexican border.” (222) A single organization, the United States border patrol, both with their behavior in the borderlands and their partnership with the American and Mexican government, played a major role in shaping the 20th century story of race throughout the entire nation. Lytle Hernandez echoes past scholarly work on the subject of immigration and the border patrol in her work, however, she moves past those works, looking at the issue from an on-the-ground perspective of immigration implementation instead of focusing solely on immigration at the legal level. The border patrol enforce the laws of the immigration system, a system which is, “…a deeply consequential system that manages, shapes, and participates in the inequitable distribution of rights, protections and benefits between citizens and immigrations and among the various immigrant-status groups within the United States.” (9) Working on behalf of an already corrupt system, the border patrol augments their influence on the nation’s ideas of race by allocating local understandings about race to the country as a whole.
How Race Is Made in America, written by associate professor of History and Urban Studies at University of California San Diego, Natalia Molina in 2013, directly looks at how the process of Mexican immigration into the United States affects race and citizenship. Though her central focus is the topic of race, Molina uses immigration as an explanation of how race came to be understood. The immigration system between 1924 and 1965 reshaped racial categories, thus influencing how the citizens of the United States view race. Molina argues the need to change the approach to discussing immigration and race, from a comparative approach to a relative approach. While a comparative treatment of races, “…compares and contrasts groups, treating them as independent of one another; a relational treatment recognizes that race is a mutually constitutive process and thus attends to how, when, where, and to what extent groups intersect.” (Molina, 4) The author looks to build on scholars such as Tomas Almaguer and Neil Foley who both present race as needing contextualization to be fully understood.
Molina’s central theory is the idea of racial scripts, a term emphasizing the linkage between races, and it’s application in the example of Mexican immigration. Racial scripts illustrate how, “Despite the passage of time and changes in social and cultural norms, what once served to marginalize and disenfranchise one group can be revived and recycled to marginalize other groups.” (7) She employs Asian and African American experiences to illustrate how those of Mexican descent were affected in relation to them. By, “…looking at how ethnic and national groups entered the racial lexicon of the United States during that same period, one begins to see the relationships in racial thinking and the interconnectedness of specific racial categories.” (6) Through the examples of interconnectedness of racial scripts, Molina brings to light obstacles of Mexicans in entering and integrating into the United States. Immigration laws are another force that have an affect on the ideas of race; “…laws [shape] daily practices, such as how people [think] about and [act] toward immigrants, and still effectively [impact] how and where immigrants fit into the nation.” (12) Like Lytle Hernandez’s Migra!: A History of U.S. Border Patrol, Molina also examines the impact of the immigration laws, processes, and actors on the general population’s impressions of race in the United States. Ultimately, Molina employs both examples of racial scripts as well as the immigration process to understand society’s predisposition to “…utilize historical experience and stereotypes of past groups to define and circumscribe the place and role of future members of U.S. society.” (16) These experiences and procedures have direct effect on how entire nations view race.
All three of the books aforementioned focus on a distinctly different angle of the topic of immigration. Impossible Subjects examines the identity produced through immigration laws and practices, while Migra!: A History of U.S. Border Patrol studies the development and patterns of the border patrol institution and the effects of them on a nationwide scale. Finally, How Race Is Made in America inspects racial experiences, specifically immigration experiences, to see the effect on how the citizens of the United States understand race. Though all are on different subjects, each speaks on common broader themes such as exclusion, and the development of racial ideas. There is a movement from studying broader context of immigration to an on-the-ground experience of immigration between Ngai’s Impossible Subjects and Lytle Hernandez’s Migra!: A History of Border Patrol. The significant role of the border patrol in immigration and ideas of race are mentioned in both of the first two books. There can be seen a new trend of contextualizing immigration and the immigrant experience. Migra!: A History of Border Patrol and How Race Is Made in America, written in 2010 and 2014 respectively, place significant emphasis on contextualizing Mexican immigrant histories with other races histories. Seen by the authors mentioning previous scholars and their works, it can be understood that the study of immigration has seen a continuous building of information and theory about it over the past half a century. Scholars are attacking the topic from diverse approaches, resulting in new considerations and comprehensions of the ideas central to United States immigration.
Immigration has vastly transformed over the past century in the United States, and as the history of immigration grows, the study of the topic matures as well. Scholars on immigration, citizenship, and race continue to find new methods and approaches to study the immigration field. There remains a core commonality in the study: immigration’s relation to race; however, scholars are compounding onto this central idea, bringing knowledge from other areas to develop the understanding of immigration as a whole.
Works Cited
Hernandez, Kelly Lytle, Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Print.
Molina, Natalia, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. Berkeley: University of Calforina Press, 2014. Print.
Ngai, Mae M., Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004. Print
Thoughts on Histories 