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

by Kelly Lytle Hernández

A revolutionary new history that exposes the “whites-only” roots of the American immigration regime.
MacArthur–winning 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 a quartet of cases about Chinese exclusion to declare immigration law outside the guardrails of the Constitution. She reveals how eugenicists and segregationists of the early twentieth century 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 survived civil rights movement reforms and remain in force today. Just as The Color of Law explained the structural damage of redlining and Stamped from the Beginning examined the deep roots of white supremacy, Racist by Design demonstrates how a complex legal machine, built by generations of lawmakers, continues to target nonwhite migrants for exclusion, punishment, and removal while creating a permanent caste of undocumented and criminalized workers to provide cheap labor for the American economy.

320 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication September 22, 2026

About the author

Kelly Lytle Hernández holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History and directs the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. A 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient, she is the author of the award-winning books Migra! and City of Inmates. She lives in Los Angeles, California.