White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall

by Reece Jones

Overview

“This powerful and meticulously argued book reveals that immigration crackdowns … [have] always been about saving and protecting the racist idea of a white America.”
—Ibram X. Kendi, award-winning author of Four Hundred Souls and Stamped from the Beginning

“A damning inquiry into the history of the border as a place where race is created and racism honed into a razor-sharp ideology.”
—Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The End of the Myth

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807054123
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	10/12/2021
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	485,753
File size:	865 KB

About the Author

Reece Jones is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and a professor in and the chair of the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawai‘i. He has researched immigration for over 20 years and is the author of Border Walls and Violent Borders, over 2 dozen journal articles, and 4 edited books. He is editor in chief of the journal Geopolitics and lives in Honolulu with his family. Connect with him on Twitter at @ReeceJonesUH.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

★ 10/01/2021

Jones (geography and environment, Univ. of Hawai'i; Violent Borders) delivers a concise history of American immigration policy, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Trump era. The book peels back the surface of American policies that restricted immigration, and analyzes the underlying impulses and biases. Jones argues that prejudice and white supremacy are at the root of policies limiting entry into the United States. Individual states created the first immigration restrictions, Jones adeptly explains, while the federal government was only empowered to grant citizenship rights; it would take subsequent Supreme Court rulings to shift immigration policymaking to the federal government. Jones does an excellent job simplifying these Supreme Court rulings and explaining how the laws were enacted. He carefully investigates contemporary private companies that wield their political power and pour considerable funds into efforts to block immigration reform. He also identifies tangible relationships (historical and/or contemporary) between a number of American companies and white supremacist organizations. VERDICT A highly recommended, in-depth history of migration that accounts for the lives affected by American border policing and immigration restrictions.—Jacob Sherman, Univ. of Texas, San Antonio

Library Journal

2021-06-25
A critical examination of U.S. immigration policies across the centuries as instruments of racism.

Jones, a professor of geography and environment in Hawaii, reveals that that island state, as well as Puerto Rico, were long excluded from allowing immigrants precisely because both “had large nonwhite citizen populations.” This exclusion followed from a 19th-century policy, born of Jeffersonian tenets at the birth of the republic, that held that the notion of all men being equal applied to White men only, with only “a free white person” eligible for citizenship. Such convictions were common in Jefferson’s day—and in Trump’s. As Jones writes, Reince Priebus, then serving as Republican National Committee chair, warned Trump to tone down his racism during the 2016 campaign “because it could tarnish all of the Republicans running for president,” to which Trump responded by doubling down on his anti-Mexican and then anti-Muslim rhetoric. Jones engages in good investigative journalism to chase down the sources of Trumpthink, given that Trump has never had an original idea of his own, in a complex and “carefully orchestrated effort” to place the racist, exclusionary politics of a century past (pitched largely at excluding Asians from coming to the U.S.) at the center of a new sort of mainstream politics feeding a fearful base. This effort involved the feeding of millions of dollars to anti-immigration groups—$63 million from one donor alone. These groups exalted ideas by the likes of a Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton, who asserted that “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority.” By this incisive account, that concept was red meat for the likes of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, the latter of whom cut his teeth on the racist politics of former Trump ally Jeff Sessions.

The author’s ability to connect the dots is impressive—and depressing, since the politics of ethnic hatred persist.

Kirkus Reviews