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

A revolutionary new history that exposes the "whites-only" roots of the American immigration regime.

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 work...