Thursday, March 3, 2022
Author Mae Ngai, a central historian in the field of immigration and law, led a discussion of her latest work, The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics. Mae’s book provides a historical and global lens on Chinese migration and legal exclusion, and sets a foundation for modern conceptions of race. In her first book, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern American, she examined immigration to the U.S. and the legal exclusion of multiple groups from the illegalization of Mexican migrants to Japanese internment.
Mae M. Ngai is Lung Family Professor of Asian American Studies and Professor of History, and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. She is a U.S. legal and political historian interested in the histories of immigration, citizenship, nationalism, and the Chinese diaspora. She is author of the award winning Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004); The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America (2010); and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics (2021). Ngai has written on immigration history and policy for the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, the Nation, and Dissent. Before becoming a historian she was a labor-union organizer and educator in New York City, working for District 65-UAW and the Consortium for Worker Education. She is now writing Nation of Immigrants: A Short History of an Idea (under contract with Princeton University Press).
Following the presentation, Luisa Heredia, The Joanne Woodward Chair in Public Policy, moderated an audience Q&A.
This event was sponsored by the Migration, Mobilities, and Social Justice Faculty Working Group.