What would the U.S. immigration system look like if it were a machine, made of wheels and gears, controlled by belts and joints? In Kelly Lytle Hernández’s new book, Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control, illustrations by the artist Mariah Tso help readers visualize such a contraption. Its parts are etched with important names and dates, Supreme Court cases, racist proclamations, and key concepts such as eugenics, no due process, and warrantless arrests. These sketches leave the impression that immigration control functions smoothly to exclude certain people—requiring only the occasional application of oil or glue.
I would depict this machine differently, as would many historians. Its parts would be misaligned and mismatched; it would leak and spew smoke, expand and contract at random, and periodically grind to a halt.
Yet Tso’s illustrations perfectly reflect the argument made by Lytle Hernández, a history professor at UCLA whose previous books have focused on the Border Patrol, mass incarceration, and Mexican anarchists. In Racist by Design, she contends that the United States since its founding has had a “whites-only immigration system.” That system has evolved, she says, but it remains “racist by design: It always has been and it still is.”
We shouldn’t take “whites-only” literally, Lytle Hernández cautions. Instead, she writes, the term is an “interpretive device” to help us understand “racialized power.” She borrows language from the book Let This Radicalize You, in which two organizers, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, argue for studying a machine to figure out “what blows could actually disable it.” Lytle Hernández wants Racist by Design to land as a blow propelled by the force of history, inspiring collective action that will “keep pushing” the machine “and make it tip.”
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It isn’t controversial to say that racism has often motivated American immigration policy. Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior aide and homeland-security adviser, is hardly the first nativist to set federal priorities. Yet Lytle Hernández’s contention that more than two centuries of immigration control boil down to a story of white supremacy is an overstatement, even if it’s an important provocation.
Lytle Hernández briefly acknowledges that “whiteness” isn’t always a simple category—that eugenicists have invented hierarchies among white people, and that racially neutral language, such as the word pauper, has been used to deport Irish people. But she doesn’t discuss how the meaning of whiteness changed over time; some white people were considered less white than others. She mentions other factors in debates over who can enter the country—sexuality, religion, public health, international diplomacy, ideology—but brushes them aside quickly so that they don’t muddy her point. These omissions and elisions make her argument vulnerable to challenges not only from historians who have studied other modes of discrimination, but also from political opponents eager to sabotage her cause.
Plenty of evidence supports Lytle Hernández’s larger case. The Naturalization Act of 1790 said that only “a free white person” could naturalize, after living in the United States for two years. The first federal immigration ban was the 1803 Immigration Act, whose main proponents were enslavers seeking to block the entry of Black Caribbeans fleeing the Haitian Revolution.
This pattern persisted for the next 150 years. In the mid-19th century, California state legislators levied a tax on foreign miners to keep nonwhite immigrants away from the gold mines. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which survived in different guises and iterations until 1943. And the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act established national-origins quotas that capped the total number of immigrants at 150,000 a year, while reserving 96 percent of those slots for European immigrants and 84 percent for those from northwestern Europe, according to Lytle Hernández. Senator David Reed, a Republican from Pennsylvania who co-authored the law, said, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our nordic population being overrun by lower races.”
By 1940, Lytle Hernández writes, Europeans and Canadians, who at this point were all considered equally white, accounted for 94 percent of the foreign-born population living in the United States. Even after laws were liberalized and these numbers changed, members of both political parties tried to boost the proportion of white immigrants by prioritizing what the liberal Senator Ted Kennedy called the “old seed sources of our heritage.” This was all before the Trump administration made race-based immigration de facto American policy—most pointedly by deporting mainly nonwhite immigrants while welcoming white South Africans who claimed to be victims of a Black-led government.
The author shows how the intrinsic racism of these moves is not accidental or incidental, but by design. She adds fresh insights as well by tracking the gradual concentration of immigration enforcement in the hands of the federal government, and by showing how fights over naturalization were entwined with debates over the treatment of Black people and Native Americans. And she reframes the immigration story as focusing on not only the people we let into the country, but also those we keep out. This complicates Americans’ conception of themselves as a nation of immigrants; we are also a nation that has excluded them.
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Lytle Hernández is too good a historian to skip over more permissive periods, even when they fail to serve her argument. She calls the passage of the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment the “single-largest mass naturalization action in U.S. history,” because these laws “created more than four million new African American citizens.” When white settlers in the western U.S. challenged the birthright citizenship of Chinese Americans, the Supreme Court, in its 1898 ruling United States v. Wong Kim Ark, “unambiguously affirmed” that almost all children born in the United States were citizens. (The children of Native Americans, diplomats, and occupying troops in a hypothetical invasion were exceptions.) Nobody has conclusively counted the number of Americans born to undocumented immigrants who became citizens because of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the Pew Research Center has calculated that it has exceeded 100,000 a year since at least 1990.
This past summer, in its Trump v. Barbara decision, the Supreme Court invalidated the president’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship and explicitly upheld the ruling in Wong Kim Ark. Trump’s solicitor general, D. John Sauer, argued that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment intended to extend birthright citizenship only to freed slaves and their children. But a majority of the justices found that the language of the amendment was plain and applied to every person born in the United States, no matter their race or heritage. As alarming as it was that three justices sided with Trump, the decision, like earlier rulings from the top court, undermines Lytle Hernández’s idea of a whites-only immigration regime.
Often, the author downplays government action by the courts, Congress, or presidents that benefited nonwhite immigrants. As a result of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended national-origins quotas, the United States went from being 16 percent nonwhite to 40 percent nonwhite in 60 years. Lytle Hernández frames this accomplishment as the unintentional result of mistaken reassurances; President Lyndon B. Johnson, for one, announced that it was not “a revolutionary bill,” and would not change people’s daily lives. Insofar as it altered the nation’s ethnic makeup, restrictionists felt that it did change their lives—and ever since, they have considered it to be one of the worst pieces of legislation in American history.
The 1965 act contained strong, explicitly anti-racist language: “No person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of his race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence.” Lytle Hernández quotes this passage, but then immediately points out that the law left in place measures that disproportionately affected Mexican immigrants. This landmark of mid-century liberalism was another example of what the legal scholar Reva Siegel has called “preservation through transformation,” in which laws dismantling discriminatory status hierarchies could nevertheless perpetuate them. Yet the act was genuinely transformative, as were the ideas behind it. Earlier that year, Johnson had made immigration the focus of his State of the Union address. Too many people within our borders were “trapped in poverty and idleness and fear,” he said. “Let a just nation throw open to them the city of promise” by passing an immigration law that is “based on the work a man can do and not where he was born or how he spells his name.”
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These ideas have animated our nation’s immigration debate as strongly as those of the restrictionists. If the 1965 law didn’t represent progress, certain conservative lawmakers and commentators would not have attempted to roll it back over the next 60 years. If there were no positive, non-racist vision of immigration law, there would have been no debate at all.
Two decades later, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act created a pathway to citizenship for close to 3 million immigrants (including more than 2 million from Mexico). Lytle Hernández says that the law, signed by President Ronald Reagan, came about because Chicana and Chicano activists “convinced” Congress to do it. In fact, support for the law came from a wide range of actors, including some conservative Latinos and Republican senators whom Lytle Hernández surely doesn’t count as immigrant-rights advocates, such as California’s Pete Wilson and South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond. The 1990 Immigration Act, passed under another Republican administration, expanded amnesty for the close relatives of immigrants whose status had been legalized in 1986, and as recently as 2007, President George W. Bush supported a comprehensive reform bill (which failed to pass).
Seen in this light, IRCA’s amnesty provision looks less like a temporary setback for white supremacy than an indicator of America’s shifting racial politics. As the alliances of the 1980s unraveled, the familiar partisan outlines came into view: a Republican Party committed to walls and deportation, and a Democratic Party that advocated for immigrant rights. But this realignment is not necessarily any more permanent than the last one.
Even Lytle Hernández’s greatest insight—the importance of federal control—cuts both ways. Washington lawyers and judges didn’t just restrict immigration rights, as she demonstrates; they also checked racist state laws, throwing sand in the gears of the whites-only machine. After Wilson left the Senate to become the governor of California, he championed Proposition 187, a law that sought to deny services and benefits to undocumented immigrants. A federal judge overturned it because national law preempted such state action. In 2012, two years after Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed S.B. 1070, which broadened state police powers to arrest undocumented immigrants, the Supreme Court struck most of the law down for the same reason.
Lytle Hernández should have given more weight to such moments not simply to tell a more balanced story, but also to help us understand why arguments for restriction failed or succeeded. She argues that racist immigration laws were beaten back by “nonwhite migrants and their advocates”—abolitionists, Chinese and Japanese individuals and organizations fighting anti-Asian policies, NAACP lawyers, and Chicano and Chicana activists and immigration attorneys. What her resisters share is that they attacked the machine from the outside. But for well over a century, insiders, including presidents and judges, have also tried to move the machine in a non-racist direction, while outsiders, including African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans, have sometimes supported restricting immigration.
Instead of exploring all these forces—liberal progress and conservative backlash, conviction and compromise, the realities of an imperfect union—Lytle Hernández has written a largely frictionless story in which racists have created immigration policies and anti-racists have achieved limited gains, sometimes by accident. There’s plenty of truth to that story, but toppling the machine will require a broad-based movement that wrestles more fully with the messiness of our country’s history.
By glossing over liberal victories and minimizing the efforts of reformers apart from a few, mostly doomed activists, Lytle Hernández makes a stronger case for defeatism than optimism. Historians like to say that the past is contingent, not predetermined. Much of Lytle Hernández’s previous work has demonstrated that proposition brilliantly. If immigration policy has been a machine, it has been a paradoxical one: rickety yet terrifying, subject to spasms of reform, deeply racist yet unable to settle forever who is “in” and who is “out.” This machine has been abused, patched up, and manipulated to serve nefarious goals. It has also been repaired, and bent toward justice. If today’s machine is toppled, history teaches us that whatever replaces it will inevitably be forged in the fires of democracy, messy and incomplete.