“The Whites-Only Immigration Regime”
Doria Dee Johnson Lecture in History and Social Justice
Kelly Lytle Hernandez (UCLA)
After the U.S. Civil War, federal authorities slowly built a whites-only immigration regime that targeted Black and other non-white immigrants for exclusion, punishment, and removal. By 1930, the regime was complete, making it nearly impossible for Black, Mexican, and Asian immigrants to enter the United States. During the Civil Rights Movement, Congress amended the regime’s admission system, making it possible for nonwhite immigrants to begin entering and settling in the United States in large numbers. But federal authorities have yet to fully repeal and replace the whites-only immigration regime, leaving intact the enforcement tactics designed to target nonwhite immigrants for exclusion, punishment, and removal. This talk tracks the rise of the whites-only immigration regime and how federal authorities have yet to abolish it.
Professor 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 also leads the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative, which maps 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 Prizes Board.
Sponsored by the Department of History