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

Summary

In Racist by Design, 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 American economy.

Many Americans' 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 America's 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 title that will expose the blueprints of the system, so it can be dismantled. A nuanced, concise, and brilliant book that will outrage and inflame listeners, Racist by Design is a major work by one of our most important historians.