Historicizing the Present Immigration Moment

Dissent, 2007

Human Rights Review, 2007

Humans are mobile, and the movement of people across great distances is as old as the species. Yet the concept of the immigrant is a modern one. Immigrants can only exist in a system of recognized territorial states that have the infrastructure to determine who are immigrants and the ability to enumerate them. The concept of the "illegal alien" is even more recent. In the US case, it dates back to the 1920s when laws were enacted that drastically reduced the numbers of legal immigrants. Through a series of restrictive acts, a legal framework was constructed in which those who would be allowed in were legal migrants. Yet other "ineligible" or "unassimilable" peoples, who entered the country without permission, were labeled illegal aliens. According to historian Mae M. Ngai, it was immigration restriction that "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." Today, the subject of illegal aliens is part of a highly charged national debate in the USA. This makes Mae M. Ngai's reasoned and thorough exploration of immigration policy from the 1920s to 1965 an indispensable tool for understanding how the USA arrived at this point. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America is both a legislative and a social history that will appeal to immigration scholars and policy makers, as well as to those interested in questions of race and ethnicity in America. Ngai takes the reader on a discerning journey of American identity politics and racism in the twentieth century. The narrative of the book is anchored by two landmark pieces of legislation: the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 and the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. By focusing on this time period, Ngai fills a historiographic gap in the migration literature that tends to ignore this era because relatively few immigrants arrived. With the passing of the Johnson-Reed Act, immigration to the USA went into a sharp decline. The law was also the culmination of earlier acts that barred all native inhabitants of an Asiatic zone that stretched from Afghanistan to the Pacific as "racially ineligible for citizenship." Unauthorized entry into the USA was criminalized, which was "a radical departure from previous immigration policy."

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Benjamin Johnson (BHJ): How has your working life been changed by recent political developments? Julian Lim (JL): As someone trained in both law and history, law has always played a large role in my immigration history class. Thus my syllabus was already focused on state power and, in particular, the power to exclude, which obviously resonated greatly with

This course satisfies a social science general education requirement. It aims to introduce students to concepts, theories, and methods that guide comparative analysis of state policies, institutions, and political behavior. Students are expected to learn how to formulate an argument and use appropriate supporting evidence. In order to assess the success of attaining these goals, department faculty will evaluate responses to a final exam essay question without affecting the students' grade in the course.

Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets

Although the Statue of Liberty, one of the premier symbols of the United States, welcomes “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” America’s relationship with its immigrants has long been ambivalent. Throughout the United States’ history, there have been persistent and charged debates over the nature and consequences of immigration. At times, America has greatly restricted the number and characteristics of newcomers, despite its aspiration to be identified as a “nation of immigrants” and a “melting pot.” The heated, contentious debate over who should be included in the United States, and how they should be included, persists in the halls of Congress, the judiciary, the executive branch, and at the state and local levels. The literature related to history and contemporary debates regarding immigration politics and policy in the United States is expansive. This article addresses scholarship on a number of specific policy debates, as well as popular reacti...

The Journal of American History, 2005

UCI Sociology Seminar in the Spring of the Pandemic, 2020

UCI Sociology Seminar taught in the Time of the Pandemic, Spring 2020. It is precisely in such moments of crisis—which shake our taken for granted notions and routines to their foundation, revealing the artifices of our social constructions of “reality”—that a sociological imagination flourishes. The goal of this seminar is to broaden your intellectual horizons, and to invite you to a memorable sociological adventure amid a global crisis that you and I will still be talking about many years from now. The course will end in June, but not our role and responsibility as members of the polis, as citizens as well as sociologists confronted by historic crises. The critically informed citizen—whose voice is heard, who acts and votes and remains civically engaged—is racism’s and nativism’s worst enemy. Becoming a critically informed citizen; contextualizing and grasping the varieties of international migration and national (and nativist) reactions to them; seeing through the dominant ideologies of racialization, the politics of moral panics, the criminalization of immigration, detention and incarceration, exclusion and deportation, mobilization and collective action; working to end racial domination and to make this a more just world... all of this is a lifetime commitment that never ends. Silence is not an option at this (potential) turning point in the history of American democracy and racial justice, even amid a once-in-a-century pandemic. Know that history. Voice that history. Read-think-write... and act.

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2018

na ncy Foner, K ay de au x, a nd K ath a r ine m. donato In the last half century, the United States has undergone a profound demographic transformation in the wake of a massive inflow of immigrants. In 2016, immigrants represented approximately 14 percent of the U.S. population; together with their U.S.-born children the figure was more than 25 percent, a remarkable eightysix million people. This growth in immigration, mainly from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean, has altered the racial and ethnic composition of the nation. The non-Hispanic white population in the United States declined from 83 to 62 percent between 1970 and 2015, and the Hispanic population grew from 4 to 18 percent in the same period. Asians, fewer than 1 percent of the U.S. population in 1970, are now 6 percent. The number of black immigrants (from Africa and the Caribbean) has also increased, and close to 10 percent of blacks in the United States are now foreign born. The result has been greater racial and ethnic diversity in a wide swath of both urban and rural neighbor

2014

BEAULE, ANDREW U.S. Immigration: The Origins and Evolution of Contemporary Issues and the Architecture of Future Reform Department of Political Science, May 2014 ! ADVISOR: Tom Lobe ! In 1965, the United States Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, attempting to remove racial, religious, and cultural discrimination from the immigration system. However, the infamous act and subsequent legislation have caused unintended consequences. Illegal immigration has skyrocketed despite a massive increase in border enforcement; and Central Americans, particularly Mexicans, have become the target of racial and cultural discrimination, much like the Southern European immigrants of the early 1900s. The current immigration system still relies on the framework passed nearly 50 years ago, proving to be insufficient for contemporary United States. This thesis investigates the historical patterns in immigration legislation that have led to the contemporary issues that remain a subject of...