Review of the book Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal

From review: Chomsky offers a broad perspective of the historical linkages between colonization, immigration, labour, and race-thinking in the United States. She presents this book as a counternarrative to deeply entrenched myths that characterize Mexican and Central American immigrants as “illegal” and thus outside the American story. The book effectively argues how “changes in the law deliberately created illegality and did so for the purpose of keeping Mexican workers available, cheap, and deportable” (p. 22). Chomsky poses the question, “Where did illegality come from?” to illustrate the role that race-thinking plays in the social construction of “illegality”, specifically with regard to U.S. dependence on migrant labour