Recent racist anti-immigration policies, from the border wall to the Muslim ban, have left many Americans wondering: How did we get here? In what readers call a “chilling and revelatory” account, Reece Jones reveals the painful answer: although the US is often mythologized as a nation of immigrants, it has a long history of immigration restrictions that are rooted in the racist fear of the “great replacement” of whites with non-white newcomers. After the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619, the colonies that became the United States were based on the dual foundation of open immigration for whites from Northern Europe and the racial exclusion of slaves from Africa, Native Americans, and, eventually, immigrants from other parts of the world.
Jones’s scholarship shines through his extensive research of the United States’ racist and xenophobic underbelly. He connects past and present to uncover the link between the Chinese Exclusion laws of the 1880s, the “Keep America American” nativism of the 1920s, and the “Build the Wall” chants initiated by former president Donald Trump in 2016. Along the way, we meet a bizarre cast of anti-immigration characters, such as John Tanton, Cordelia Scaife May, and Stephen Miller, who pushed fringe ideas about “white genocide” and “race suicide” into mainstream political discourse. Through gripping stories and in-depth analysis of major immigration cases, Jones explores the connections between anti-immigration hate groups and the Republican Party. What is laid bare after his examination is not just the intersection between white supremacy and anti-immigration bias but also the lasting impacts this perfect storm of hatred has had on United States law.
List of Tables
Prologue
INTRODUCTION
Two Versions of History
CHAPTER 1
Go West, Young Man
CHAPTER 2
Lewd and Debauched
CHAPTER 3
Whatever Happens, the Chinese Must Go
CHAPTER 4
The White Man, Par Excellence
CHAPTER 5
The Very Fabric of Our Race
CHAPTER 6
Keep America American
CHAPTER 7
The Ethnic Mix of This Country Will Not Be Upset
CHAPTER 8
People, People, People, People
CHAPTER 9
On Our Same Side
CHAPTER 10
Invaded on All Fronts
CHAPTER 11
Hostile Takeover
CHAPTER 12
Out-Tancredo Tancredo
CHAPTER 13
The World Just Changed
CHAPTER 14
It’s Time to Make Immigration Policy Great Again
CHAPTER 15
The Invisible Wall
CONCLUSION
The Great Replacement
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
“A highly recommended, in-depth history of migration that accounts for the lives affected by American border policing and immigration restrictions.” —Library Journal, Starred Review
“The author’s ability to connect the dots is impressive—and depressing, since the politics of ethnic hatred persist.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Reece Jones explores the tragic, ludicrous, and endlessly violent creation and maintenance of America’s borders . . . Jones’s greatest contribution is to show the forces that really drove the Trump campaign.” —Chicago Review of Books
“White Borders is a searing indictment of the US immigration restrictions from Chinese Exclusion through the Trump presidency. This powerful and meticulously argued book reveals that while immigration crackdowns are justified as protecting jobs and workers, they’ve always been about saving and protecting the racist idea of a white America.” —Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist
“With eloquent prose and masterful storytelling, Reece Jones narrates the hard history of immigration policies of the US settler colonial state that was founded and rooted in white supremacy, from Chinese exclusion to the border wall.” —Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
“Reece Jones’s White Borders is a damning inquiry into the history of the border as a place where race is created and racism honed into a razor-sharp ideology. Deeply researched and movingly written, White Borders is an indispensable book.” —Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth
“Reece Jones guides us through the long, tangled, and still developing history of how the United States came to know itself as a nation through the increasingly strict control of movement across its borders. Jones demonstrates in this assiduously researched and carefully crafted book that the nation’s borders are in fact central to making the state what it is: a key tool in the maintenance not just of white supremacy but of whiteness itself.” —Brendan O’Connor, author of Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right
You might also be interested in:
