Immigration Is a Poorly Oiled Machine

W hat would the U.S. immigration system look like if it were a machine, made of wheels and gears, controlled by belts and joints? In Kelly Lytle Hernández’s new book, Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S.

Immigration Control , illustrations by the artist Mariah Tso help readers visualize such a contraption.

Its parts are etched with important names and dates, Supreme Court cases, racist proclamations, and key concepts such as eugenics, no due process, and warrantless arrests.

These sketches leave the impression that immigration control functions smoothly to exclude certain people—requiring only the occasional application of oil or glue.

I would depict this machine differently, as would many historians.

Its parts would be misaligned and mismatched; it would leak and spew smoke, expand and contract at random, and periodically grind to a halt.

Yet Tso’s illustrations perfectly reflect the argument made by Lytle Hernández, a history professor at UCLA whose previous books have focused on the Border Patrol , mass incarceration , and Mexican anarchists .

In Racist by Design , she contends that the United States since its founding has had a “whites-only immigration system.” That system has evolved, she says, but it remains “racist by design: It always has been and it still is.” We shouldn’t take “whites-only” literally, Lytle Hernández cautions.

Instead, she writes, the term is an “interpretive device” to help us understand “racialized power.” She borrows language from the book Let This Radicalize You , in which two organizers, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, argue for studying a machine to figure out “what blows could actually disable it.” Lytle Hernández wants Racist by Design to land as a blow propelled by the force of history, inspiring collective action that will “keep pushing” the machine “and make it tip.” [ Read: What Stephen Miller gets wrong about human nature ] It isn’t controversial to say that racism has often motivated American immigration policy.

Stephen Miller , Trump’s senior aide and homeland-security adviser, is hardly the first nativist to set federal priorities.

Yet Lytle Hernández’s contention that more than two centuries of immigration control boil down to a story of white supremacy is an overstatement, even if it’s an important provocation.

Lytle Hernández briefly acknowledges that “whiteness” isn’t always a simple category—that eugenicists have invented hierarchies among white people, and that racially neutral language, such as the word pauper , has been used to deport Irish people.

But she doesn’t discuss how the meaning of whiteness changed over time; some white people were considered less white than others.