The Whites-Only Immigration Regime, 1803 to Now

Join one of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration for a talk that chronicles the rise, evolution, and persistence of the whites-only immigration regime, from 1803 to now.

During the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), Congress passed the nation’s first immigration ban, targeting free Black migrants, namely Haitians, for exclusion. After the Civil War, federal authorities wildly expanded the nation’s immigration system to target Black, Asian, and other nonwhite immigrants for exclusion, punishment, and removal, creating the framework for our modern immigration system. By the 1930s, Congress had adopted a Whites-only immigration regime in all but name. That regime effectively hung a “Whites only” sign on the nation’s front door while propping the nation’s “backdoor” open to a racialized, criminalized, and deportable workforce. To date, federal authorities have revised but never repealed this system. This talk chronicles the rise, evolution, and persistence of the whites-only immigration regime, from 1803 to now.

Kelly Lytle Hernández holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010), City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), and Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands (Norton, 2022). She is also the founding director and principal advisor for the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative, which documents the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. For her historical and contemporary work, Professor Lytle Hernández was named a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also an elected member of the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Pulitzer Prize Board.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of History and the Center for Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender & Sexuality Studies (RIDGS).