The special powerlessness of the immigrant has its source, we are wont to think, in the fact that the foreigner comes from elsewhere. The foreigner's origins outside the community supposedly make it possible and permissible for the community to deny his or her claims upon it. An entrenched constitutional tradition in the United States undergirds this view. Political theorists have offered elaborate arguments defending it.

My own particular experience of the powerlessness of the immigrant seeking admission led me to wonder exactly what it is about an individual's coming from elsewhere that makes it possible to deny his or her claims on the community. I turned to the archives, if not for definitive answers, then at least for ways to transcend my own experience by learning about the experiences of others. What I discovered was that the experience of foreignness – and of the powerlessness associated with it – has never been unique to those coming from outside the United States. Over the centuries, Americans have named and treated like foreigners not only immigrants from outside the country, but also Native Americans, blacks, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, women, the poor, and political minorities. Designation as foreign is not a function of coming from the territorial outside. It is a political strategy that has been used inside and outside the country and to multiple ends.

The Making Foreigners of the title of this book focuses attention on the multiple processes of rendering foreign that have been at work vis-à-vis outsiders and insiders over the long span of American history. On the one hand, it is an exhortation to immigrants to recognize the parallels between their experiences and the experiences of those “on the inside.” On the other hand, it is an exhortation to those “on the inside” to recognize the foreigners they have once been (and might still be) so as to rethink their relationship to those “on the outside.” In this vein, as I see it, the cover image – a stark photograph of a room at San Francisco's Angel Island immigration station – deconstructs notions of “inside” and “outside” insofar as the room likely served not only for the exclusion of outsiders, but also for the ejection of insiders. As I will argue in this book, if the former was the experience of Asian immigrants, the latter could be the experience of Asian Americans.