“The Whites-Only Immigration Regime, 1803 to Now“
Kelly Lytle Hernandez, The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair of History at UCLA

4:30pm in Hodson 213 (Reception to follow in the Gilman Atrium)

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 To date, federal authorities have revised but never repealed this system.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.

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). In 2016, she founded the Million Dollar Hoods research initiative, which maps fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles and, between 2017 and 2022, she led the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. 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.