ABSTRACT
Mae M. Ngai is an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago. This article is adapted from Illegal Aliens and Alien Citizens: Immigration Restriction, Race, and Nation, 1924–1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming). Previous versions were presented at the Globalization Workshop, University of Chicago, May 2000; Legal History Colloquium, New York University Law School, November 2000; Political Science Seminar of the Graduate Faculty of New School University, February 2001; Law and Society Association, July 2001; and American Society for Legal History, November 2001. For comments and criticism she is grateful to workshop and conference participants and to Gabriel J. Chin, Eric Foner, Gary Gerstle, Neil Gotanda, Victoria Hattam, Nancy Morawetz, Gerald Neuman, Kunal Parker, Teemu Ruskola, Lucy Salyer, Amy Stanley, Leti Volpp, Aristide Zolberg, and Christopher Tomlins and the anonymous readers for Law and History Review. She thanks Aaron Shapiro and Deborah Cohen for research assistance. Research and writing were funded in part by the Social Science Research Council International Migration Program, the Samuel I. Goleib Fellowship at NYU Law School, and a Daniel Greenstone research grant from the Division of Social Sciences, University of Chicago. She gratefully acknowledges the Central Office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington, D.C., for allowing her access to its records and INS Historian Marian Smith for her generous assistance. 180without warrants and wherever they find an alien they stop him. If he is illegally in the country, they take him to unit headquarters.” 1
