Summary of Mae M. Ngai's Impossible Subjects

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 marked the beginning of restriction in American immigration policy. It placed numerical limits on immigration and established a quota system that classified the world’s population according to nationality and race, ranking them in a hierarchy of desirability for admission into the United States.

#2 Until the 1920s, immigration into the United States was unrestricted, reflecting a tradition of laissez-faire labor mobility that dated to the colonial period. Chinese exclusion was the major exception to this rule.

#3 The first federal immigration laws established qualitative criteria for selective or individual exclusion that expressed normative definitions of social desirability. The Immigration Service excluded only 1 percent of the 25 million immigrants from Europe who arrived in the United States from 1880 to World War I.

#4 After World War I, the international system that emerged gave primacy to the territorial integrity of the nation-state, which raised the borders between nations. This caused a crisis atmosphere around immigration in Congress in 1920, as many feared that the country would be inundated with subversives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822521629

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Insights on Mae M. Ngai's Impossible Subjects

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 marked the beginning of restriction in American immigration policy. It placed numerical limits on immigration and established a quota system that classified the world’s population according to nationality and race, ranking them in a hierarchy of desirability for admission into the United States.

#2

Until the 1920s, immigration into the United States was unrestricted, reflecting a tradition of laissez-faire labor mobility that dated to the colonial period. Chinese exclusion was the major exception to this rule.

#3

The first federal immigration laws established qualitative criteria for selective or individual exclusion that expressed normative definitions of social desirability. The Immigration Service excluded only 1 percent of the 25 million immigrants from Europe who arrived in the United States from 1880 to World War I.

#4

After World War I, the international system that emerged gave primacy to the territorial integrity of the nation-state, which raised the borders between nations. This caused a crisis atmosphere around immigration in Congress in 1920, as many feared that the country would be inundated with subversives.

#5

The first numerical restrictions were put in place in 1921, but it would be another decade before permanent immigration quotas were implemented. The intervening years were filled with contention and difficulty as Congress debated the design of a new system.

#6

The Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, and it restricted immigration to 155,000 a year, established temporary quotas based on 2 percent of the foreign-born population in 1890, and mandated the secretaries of labor, state, and commerce to determine quotas on the basis of national origins by 1927.

#7

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, race and nation were often conflated in intellectual discourse and in the public imagination. But by the mid- and late nineteenth century, physical anthropology had created scientific classifications that treated race as a distinctly biological concept.

#8

The eugenicists were strict biological determinists who believed that intelligence, morality, and other social characteristics were permanently fixed in race. They believed racial boundaries were impermeable, and that assimilation was impossible.

#9

The national origins quota system involved a complex and subtle process in which race and nationality were disaggregated and realigned in new and uneven ways.

#10

The Johnson-Reed Act mandated the formation of a committee under the Departments of Commerce, Labor, and State to allocate quotas by 1927. The Quota Board was led by Dr. Joseph A. Hill, an eminent statistician with a thirty-year tenure at the Bureau of Census.

#11

The Quota Board applied the law according to race categories in the 1920 census: white, black, mulatto, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Hindu. It discounted all blacks and mulattos, eliding the difference between the descendants of slave