Sept 28, 2026: Book Talk with Kelly Lytle Hernández on “Racist by Design”

Who designed the U.S. Immigration System?

The story of American immigration control begins earlier, and runs much deeper, than many of us realize.

What if the U.S. immigration system was not simply the product of changing political debates, but something deliberately constructed over generations?

That is the question at the heart of historian Kelly Lytle Hernández’s new book, Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control. In the book, Hernández asks readers to look at immigration control not as a collection of isolated laws and policies, but as a system with a history; one shaped by race, law, labor, political power, and the courts.

And that history begins in a surprising place.

Hernández takes the story back to the aftermath of the 1791 Haitian Revolution. As Black revolutionaries established the first independent nation in Latin America and the Caribbean, southern U.S. states developed some of the nation’s earliest immigration bans aimed at restricting Black arrivals.

From there, Racist by Design follows the development of immigration control through the era of Chinese exclusion, when federal law explicitly restricted immigration from China.

The story then moves into the twentieth century, when eugenicists and segregationists influenced the construction of immigration policy.

Taken together, these episodes challenge the idea that the racial dimensions of immigration control were accidental or incidental.

The civil-rights era brought major changes to immigration policy. But Hernández argues that those reforms did not erase every racist rule and practice embedded in the system.

A law can change. A policy can be repealed. A court can overturn a precedent.

But what happens to the larger structure that those decisions helped create?

Rather than looking at immigration policy as a series of disconnected moments, Hernández traces the connections between laws, court decisions, enforcement practices, labor needs, and racial ideologies across two centuries.

Join us for a discussion on how the system was built, who built it, whom it was designed to control, and what elements of that design survived.