Racist by Design

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