Mae M. Ngai spends the last part of her introduction in discussing "Nationalism and Sovereignty." If we look back to our time in American Core 1 we will remember the debate about Sovereignty that we saw in Bailyn's "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" as well as Wood's "The Creation of the American Republic." These idea's of Sovereignty ultimately served as the mortar for the construction of the United States as a modern Nation-State.
The construction and the influence of the modern Nation-State is an integral part of Ngai's assesment on the construction of immigrant status. Ngai states that "nations are," using a Benedict Anderson phrase, "historically produced 'imagined communities.'"(9)The constructed nature of the nation state leads Ngai to ask such question about, "the violation of the nation's sovereign space that produces a different kind of illegal alien and different valuation of claims that he or she can make on society?"(7)Or more generally, just how does the constructed entity of the "Nation" effect the lives of those in a state of flux within a globe dominated by various national entities?
Ngai wastes very little time in stating that the "country" introduced the problem of "illegal immigration" into the "internal spaces of the nation." Her assessment that "Immigration restriction produced the illegal alien as a new legal and political subject(emphasis hers), whose inclusion within the nation was simultaneously a social reality and legal impossibility" moves towards an understanding of how individual subjectivity are constructed and dominated by the nation state and the popular discourse that supports it.(4)
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