The article assigned for this week written by Mae M. Ngai goes through all the different ways political leaders twisted and turned Immigration laws to justify their racist ideologies. The article thus argues that in fact the Immigration law of 1924 was compromised of racialized categories created to suit the needs of “white” Europeans. The law broke down what groups of people were desirable enough to be granted the opportunity to “become American” and those groups who were not. The groups, as we know from class, who were discriminated against in the process of “becoming American” were Asians, Blacks, and even people from Latin American countries such as Mexicans, etc. The article then analyzed three aspects of the Immigration Act of 1924 which were essentially, the invention of “national origins”, the concept of “ineligibility to citizenship”, and finally the role the law took in the racialization of Mexicans. The invention of national origins is something politicians took charge of to exclude certain groups of people from the ability to claim the status of being “white”. The creation of the concept of being ineligible for citizenship then stemmed off of the exclusion and inclusion of those groups deemed white and non-white. The racialization of Mexicans we learned is a complicated one that came in phases. We learned in class that at one point Mexicans were deemed “white” under the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo but the status of the treaty slowly lost power as time went by and the United States came to see Mexicans as illegal aliens and created an entire border patrol to further push the criminalization of boarder crossing from Mexico into the States. The Immigration Act of 1924 also made it difficult for all peoples of Asian descent and ultimately deemed them the least desirable. Thus from reading this article we really get a feel for how far leaders will go to suit their beliefs in regards to othering themselves from people that may not exactly look and talk like them.