1965 immigration act
A01=Kelly Lytle Hernandez
Author_Kelly Lytle Hernandez
Category=JBFA
Category=JBFH
Category=JPVH
Category=NHK
chinese exclusion act
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
forthcoming
haitian revolution u.s.-mexico border
ice
immigration act of 1790
immigration and nationality act 1952
mass incarceration
mccarran-walter act
u.s. immigration history
white supremacy
Product details
- ISBN 9781324117094
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 22 Sep 2026
- Publisher: WW Norton & Co
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández argues that white supremacy has shaped every aspect of the American immigration regime in this nuanced and powerful new book. She explains how southern states passed some of the nation’s first immigration bans to restrict Black arrival in response to the 1791 Haitian revolution. She shows how the Supreme Court used cases about Chinese exclusion to declare immigration law outside the guardrails of the Constitution. She reveals how early twentieth century eugenicists and segregationists built much of our modern immigration system, which was explicitly designed to be “whites-only.” And she details how much of the system's racist provisions remain in force today.
Racist by Design demonstrates how a complex legal machine continues to target non-white migrants for exclusion, punishment and removal while creating a permanent caste of undocumented and criminalised workers to provide cheap labour for the American economy.
Kelly Lytle Hernández’s Bad Mexicans (9781324064411) has been praised as:
"There is no Hollywood movie about the magonistas, although reading Bad Mexicans is like watching one... Lytle Hernández’s pen is her sword; her writing is a monument to the belief that language can change the world." — Geraldo Cadava, The New Yorker
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.
