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[[File:Impossiblesubjects.jpg|thumbnail|left|250px|<i>Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America - Book Review</i> by Mae Ngai]

During the 2016 election debates, candidate Trump proposed a solid wall as a solution for limiting illegal immigration from Mexico. The wall would stretch between the United States and Mexico while supporting dispersed checkpoints along the boundary. Mae Ngai, professor of Asian American Studies at Columbia University traced the intricate history of immigration legislation and construction of identities through immigration during the 20th century in her book, ''Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America''. Ngai focuses on the years 1924 to 1965, which was marked by the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 that implemented a national origins quota system. This act signaled the beginning of politicizing immigrants into categories of undesirables such as criminals and anarchist. As Ngai described it, the codification of immigration “remapped the nation in two important ways.” (3) First, “new ethnic and racial map based on new categories and hierarchies of difference” was drawn, and second, “a new sense of territoriality” was “marked by unprecedented awareness” through “state surveillance of the nation’s contiguous land borders.” (3) On the path to citizenship, Ngai reveals that the fear of Chinese laborers crossing physical boundaries from Canada and Mexico were misplaced, instead many of the immigrants posed as persons who were legally admissible, often with fraudulent certificates identifying them as merchants or by claiming to be American citizens by native birth or as the China-born sons of U.S. citizens, known formally as derivative citizens” (204)