Illegality

In Mae Ngai's "Impossible Subjects" Ngai writes, "The telos of immigration settlement, assimilation, and citizenship has been an enduring narrative of American history, but it has not always been the reality of immigrants' desires or their experiences and interactions with American society and state," (3).

This "myth" Ngai refers to is reminiscent of a central theme in Jack London's "The Chinago."
There is a tragic irony that pervades the central character Au Cho, who finds safety in his fantasy of a garden, but it's dream he will never attain.

This fictional irony is a sad reality for illegal immigrants that come to the United States fueled by a false narrative that citizenship is "a relatively easy process of naturalization (five years residence with no criminal record)" (5) and can be granted to those born on US soil.

Truth deviates from fantasy when parents get deported, families torn apart; Immigrants become marginalized in the workforce constrained to low-wages jobs; excluded from the culture as hobbies, entertainment, food, clothing are racialized; neighborhoods become divided not simply by wealth but by a uncanny correlation to race and origin. Immigrants can become alienated in every facet of American life, illegal or not.

In all these readings it's unnerving to see the parallels between events that occurred in the 19th century, to the debates we are still having today in 2014 discussing civil rights and liberties, witnessing escalating violence based on paranoid fears of "the other." It's still very much an us/them culture, a yours/mine kind of land that is so deeply ingrained into our system yet so fundamentally against the liberties and open-arms portrait the US likes to paint of itself. It's tragic to see the real, the visceral (people, families, lives) collide so hard with the not-real, (reverence for laws & imaginary borders, philosophical notions, and convictions that are all changing and being re-defined with time).