Eventually many of these people were naturalized, although Ngai reports that one social consequence of the paper-son phenomenon was that immigrants were stigmatized as illegitimate and that the stigma contributed to the immigrant tendency toward insularity and segregation from America's social mainstream. During the Cold War, the INS instituted the "Chinese Confession Program," which called on paper sons to clear up their kinship ties in exchange for legalized resident-alien status (Ngai, 1998). Ngai distinguishes between that and amnesty of the kind extended toward Mexican and other Latin American immigrants in 1986, pointing out that the confession program is predicated of a presumption of guilt, whereas amnesty properly so called is in the nature of a project of forgiveness. As it was, the Confession Program, which was aimed at getting whole families to clarify their relationships, also invited informants and opportunists to become involved in the affairs of other Chinese immigrants and to subject them to pressure from government authorities. The stake
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