Race Matters

An important theme that runs throughout Impossible Subjects is “how restrictive immigration laws produced new categories of racial difference” (7). According to Ngai, the passing of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 ushered in a period of racially restrictive immigration policies that would significantly alter how America viewed citizenship rights and the perception of the “American identity.” She provides a table of immigration quotas based on national origin which gives the reader hard numbers that show obligatory racial bias (28-29). Ngai also cites various court cases to show how understandings of race and “Americanness” were not simply anecdotal, but entrenched policy. For example, in Takao Ozawa v. U.S. (1922) and U.S. v. Bhagat Singh Thind (1923) the court ruled that “Japanese and Asian Indians were racially ineligible to citizenship” and therefore “cast Japanese and Asian Indians with Chinese as unassimilable aliens and helped constitute the racial category ‘Asian’” (38). This racialization of unwanted immigrants was drawn in even sharper terms during World War II with the internment of Japanese-American citizens. When addressing the issue of the differing treatment of Germans and Italians from that of the Japanese, Earl Warren stated that the U.S. had methods for effectively testing the loyalty of the Caucasian race, “but when we deal with the Japanese we are in an entirely different field and cannot form any opinion that we believe to be sound” (176). That Warren could express his racial bias so openly demonstrates the racial climate of the time.

While Ngai draws a clear picture of the history of U.S. immigration policy between the 1924 and 1967, she also provides ample evidence of America’s on-going policy of racism in the building and sustaining of this country throughout the twentieth century. She shows how new categories of race were created to deal with the increasing threats of foreign “invasion” even while the more familiar domestic segregation of Jim Crow thrived.