Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control

In Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control, award-winning historian Kelly Lytle Hernández reveals how generations of lawmakers and law enforcers built the American immigration system to encourage white immigrants while targeting nonwhite migrants for exclusion, punishment, and removal. The goal, often explicitly stated by the system’s architects, was to create a permanent caste of undocumented and criminalized workers to provide cheap labor for the U.S. economy.

For many people in the United States, their understanding of the immigration system begins with the Chinese Exclusion Act of the late nineteenth century. Lytle Hernández expands that history by a full century, showing how the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s inspired not only the United States’ first immigration bans (to prevent news of a free Black republic from reaching our shores) but also its first refugee resettlement program (to welcome and support Haiti’s evicted enslavers.) She explains how Chinese Exclusion led the Supreme Court to disconnect immigration laws from the constitution. She reveals how eugenicists and Jim Crow segregationists built much of our current immigration regime as expressly “whites-only,” and shows how during the Civil Rights Movement, Congress amended this system but never abolished it, leaving many of the regime’s racist rules and rituals intact today.

Lytle Hernández calls Racist by Design “an act of sabotage,” a book that will expose the blueprints of the system, so it can be dismantled. [Adapted from publishers’ description.]

ISBN: 9781324117094 | W. W. Norton & Company

Praise

At a moment when the punditry and politics of immigration so distresses the United States, award-winning historian Kelly Lytle Hernández makes it make sense. Racist by Design is a courageous call to conscience that encourages us to resist the forces of history and replace them with possibilities born of struggle. — Martha S. Jones, author of Birthright Citizens

In Racist by Design, Kelly Lytle Hernández brings the same fire she has brought to her scholarship for twenty years, showing how white supremacy has shaped our immigration system. She details how that regime was built, brick by brick, law by law, decision by decision, through precedents, rules, enforcement, and operational protocols. But like anything built, this system can be unbuilt, and Lytle Hernandez gives us the blueprints. — Natalia Molina, author of The Other Immigrant Story

Kelly Lytle Hernández is unparalleled at unearthing hidden histories of immigrant exclusion in the United States. Racist by Design reveals the depths of white supremacist policymaking and the creative resistance efforts that have challenged it. This illuminating and damning intervention in today’s immigration crisis narratives gives weight to the argument that there can be no migrant justice without racial justice. — Silky Shah, author of Unbuild Walls