The Huddled Masses, by Design

‘Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control’By Kelly Lytle HernándezNorton, 304 pagesRecent revelations about Cesar Chavez’s abuse of women were followed by a broader reassessment of the labor leader’s career. Disillusioned supporters of Mr. Chavez were also reminded that the activist was, in fact, a staunch opponent of illegal immigration.While this might seem inconceivable in 2026, for much of American history, even labor unions with close ties to immigrants tended to support restrictionist policies. The old Knights of Labor, for example, favored a tightly regulated system to keep the nation’s labor pool small, though bigotry was also a major factor, with some Irish immigrant workers lashing out violently at Chinese workers.So while the Irish were poor and vilified in the slums of New York and Boston, out west they became menacing symbols of “white supremacy.” That simply means that debates over immigration have always been fierce, bloody, and ideologically complex.UCLA scholar Kelly Lytle Hernández does not mention the Knights of Labor in her latest book “Racist by Design,” though she does extensively chronicle an array of obstacles immigrants from all across Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean have faced over the past 200 years of “white supremacist” American history.Ms. Hernández describes America’s immigration policy as “a system of state power that has produced, exacerbated and entrenched the racial order extending from European imperialism and the formation of the United States as a settler society.” She emphasizes the 1790 Naturalization Act, which limited citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person.” This, combined with a sprawling system of legalized enslavement, cast an exclusionary shadow over American immigration policy, Ms. Hernández argues.Early 19th Century challenges to this “whites only” policy came from supporters of the Haitian Revolution. Frederick Douglass’s crusades for racial justice also extended to immigration. “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto, and the Latin races,” Douglass declared, “but I want the Asiatic to…feel at home here, for his sake and ours.”To her credit, Ms. Hernández steers clear of convoluted theories about how impoverished immigrants “became” white. Instead she cites Hidetaka Hirota’s revealing research on state-level prosecutions and deportations of Irish immigrants in the 1840s. Overall, though, there is something missing from Ms. Hernández argument. There is little doubt that, at least, until the 1960s, American policy was deeply Eurocentric. What needs to be added is that native-born Americans have always been, at best, deeply conflicted and, in general, explicitly hostile to even European refugees.Since the large waves of mid-19th-century Catholic Irish arrived, immigration has become increasingly difficult to separate from other thorny issues — class, culture, religion, language, labor, and, as boring as this may seem, geography. The unchecked sprawl of big cities, with all of their real and imagined problems, has endlessly fueled a ferocious strain of American nativism, whoever the newcomers are.The end of the Civil War ushered in a specific “era of Chinese exclusion,” Ms. Hernandez writes, as “immigrants and their lawyers repeatedly took the government to court,” to fight various legal restrictions. For some reason, she does not explore the fascinating 1915 case, Dow vs. U.S., in which Lebanese and Syrian immigrants were, in fact, classified as “white.”Another bland topic that has nevertheless inflamed racial hostility is federalism — the back and forth between states and Washington over who should have the power to regulate immigration.As sound as most of Ms. Hernández’s history is, by the end of the book, it’s not clear if she believes anyone should have such power. The feds decisively seized the issue of immigration in the 1920s, when a massive influx of Eastern Europeans – mainly “Catholics and Jews,” as Ms. Hernández notes – led to sweeping restrictions.By the 1950s, Cold War politics and nostalgia for Ellis Island resulted in proposals favoring immigrants from Europe, while laborers from Mexico were forced to contend with the draconian “Operation Wetback.”Ms. Hernández’s summary of 1960s legislation is particularly timely. It is often assumed that the Civil Rights movement organically led to a general liberalization of American immigration laws, and more newcomers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. But this was, in many ways, an unintended consequence, the author notes. “The credit for the post-1965 demographic revolution…” she writes, “belongs to the world’s migrants and their advocates” who “for the first time in U.S. history, cranked open this nation’s front doors to the world.”The final chapters of “Racist by Design” read like a legal brief, intricately describing how “teams of immigration attorneys … flooded the courts” to ensure that immigrants from around the world could settle in America.Ironically, Ms. Hernández’s argument is undermined by the implication that such legal maneuvering did not also occur in the old days. All manner of righteous fights, as well as shady shenanigans, aided Irish, Russian, and Italian immigrants.The problem still with us today is that winning court cases, rather than in public sentiment or at election, is a big reason why we are living in such enraged times when it comes to immigration. For a bunch of complicated reasons, many voters feel they’ve had no say when it comes to immigration policy for decades. They might feel that even more strongly after reading “Racist by Design.”

The Huddled Masses, by Design

The Huddled Masses, by Design

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