The portrayal of the Immigrant Groups themselves, a strength of the text

I think a central part of Ngai’s text that has not seemed to come up in the blog is the portrayal of the immigrant populations themselves. Clearly a large focus of this text is on the denaturalizing the concept of illegal alien as well as the concept of nation itself. Ngai successfully does this through a richly sourced detailing of the often racist legal manipulation, usage of quota guidelines and other discourses which both redefined national cultural as well as created hierarchies of racial and national desirability. Obviously these policies and implications are extremely relevant today with the ongoing debate over immigration from Mexico and how citizenship, or the rights of citizenship, should be extended to these populations (which Ngai touches on in the text’s epilogue).
But I also think that Ngai successfully works to portray the immigrant populations as more than single monolithic groups that can be dominated or oppressed by these national and “othering” discourses. We see the immigrant populations as active and diverse groups in Ngai’s text. These immigrant populations negotiated their own citizenship through a high degree of agency that also seems to be a crucial part of Ngai’s work. For example the resistance of exploitation by Mexican bracero workers that we see detailed in Chapter 4, the negotiation of dual national loyalties by the Japanese while in the internment camps, or the financial and social support offered by Chinese family associations, are all sites of agency by these immigrant groups. This agency allowed these groups to resist a unidirectional force of immigration policy and discourse that would be damaging in many regards and thus emerged complex contact zones where culture, nationhood and policy were shifted and altered. I think this is a clear strength of Ngai’s text, because while she clearly details the racist and repressive immigration policy and rhetoric, she shows that it was not a force that was passively accepted, bought rather fought back against.