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

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Lytle Hernández's narrative bursts with relevance... A disguised and convoluted history made decipherable and urgent.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

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You can't demolish something unless you know how it's built. Kelly Lytle Hernández's brilliant new book lays out a scathing blueprint to help us understand the key roles that racism and white supremacy have always played in our immigration system. As usual, Lytle Hernández gives us a history lesson that lives, breathes, and most importantly, fights back.--Jason De León, author of Soldiers and Kings

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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

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Based on original research and thinking, Kelly Lytle Hernández explains how America's immigration law was founded on the racist premise that the country should be for white people. Black, Asian, and Latinx migrants and communities fought for the right to be in the U.S. and persisted in winning some reforms; but the hard truth is that the edifice remains. Lytle Hernández builds on a generation of immigration scholarship and takes it to another level. Important, accessible, and urgent.--Mae Ngai, author of The Chinese Question

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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

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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

Publisher Marketing:

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

Contributor Bio:Lytle Hernández, Kelly
Kelly Lytle Hernández is the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. She is a MacArthur "genius grant" recipient and the author of Racist by Design, Bad Mexicans, and several other award-winning books about race, immigration, policing, and the carceral state. She lives in Los Angeles.