Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control by Lytle Hernández, Kelly
Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control by Lytle Hernández, Kelly

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

In Racist by Design, award-winning historian Kelly Lytle Hernández reveals how generations of lawmakers and law enforcers...
$35.98 USD
$35.98 USD
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Author: Kelly Lytle Hernández
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: $35.98
Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control by Lytle Hernández, Kelly

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

$35.98
Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control by Lytle Hernández, Kelly

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

$35.98
Author: Kelly Lytle Hernández
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Description

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.



Author: Kelly Lytle Hernández
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 09/22/2026
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.09lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.28w x 1.15d
ISBN: 9781324117094


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/27/2026
Kirkus Reviews 08/01/2026

About the Author
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.
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