“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.

In Border and Rule, one of North America’s foremost thinkers and immigrant rights organizers delivers an unflinching examination of migration as a pillar of global governance and gendered racial class formation. Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of the conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change that are generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, and racist nationalist rule. Ambitious in scope and internationalist in orientation, Border and Rule breaks through American exceptionalist and liberal responses to the migration crisis and cogently maps the lucrative connections between state violence, capitalism, and right-wing nationalism around the world. Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial ideology. Further, she compellingly details how Fortress Europe and White Australia are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and how racial violence is escalating deadly nationalism in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere. A must-read in these difficult times of war, inequality, climate change, and global health crisis, Border and Rule is a clarion call for revolution. The book includes a foreword from renowned scholar Robin D. G. Kelley and an afterword from acclaimed activist-academic Nick Estes.

"This timely book reveals how the increase in traffic of transpacific plants, insects, and peoples raised fears of a "biological yellow peril" beginning in the late nineteenth century, when mass quantities of nursery stock and other agricultural products were shipped from large, corporate nurseries in Japan to meet the growing demand for exotics in the United States. Jeannie Shinozuka marshals extensive research to explain how the categories of "native" and "invasive" defined groups as bio-invasions that must be regulated-or somehow annihilated-during a period of American empire-building. Shinozuka shows how the modern fixation on foreign species provided a linguistic and conceptual arsenal for anti-immigration movements that gained ground in the early twentieth century. Xenophobia fed concerns about biodiversity, and in turn facilitated the implementation of plant quarantine measures while also valuing, and devaluing, certain species over others. The emergence and rise of economic entomology and plant pathology alongside public health and anti-immigration movements was not merely coincidental. Ultimately, what this book unearths is that the inhumane and unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II cannot, and should not, be disentangled from this longer history"--

In The Borders of Dominicanidad Lorgia García-Peña explores the ways official narratives and histories have been projected onto racialized Dominican bodies as a means of sustaining the nation's borders. García-Peña constructs a genealogy of dominicanidad that highlights how Afro-Dominicans, ethnic Haitians, and Dominicans living abroad have contested these dominant narratives and their violent, silencing, and exclusionary effects. Centering the role of U.S. imperialism in drawing racial borders between Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the United States, she analyzes musical, visual, artistic, and literary representations of foundational moments in the history of the Dominican Republic: the murder of three girls and their father in 1822; the criminalization of Afro-religious practice during the U.S. occupation between 1916 and 1924; the massacre of more than 20,000 people on the Dominican-Haitian border in 1937; and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. García-Peña also considers the contemporary emergence of a broader Dominican consciousness among artists and intellectuals that offers alternative perspectives to questions of identity as well as the means to make audible the voices of long-silenced Dominicans.

Despite claims about globalization, we see increasing surveillance, tightened restrictions and growing punitive regimes at international borders. This critical collection examines processes of racialization in relation to border regulations and restrictions. It analyses border controls, racism, and representations of race, within multinational contexts as aspects of neo-liberal governance. It also looks at means by which people resist or challenge racialization. This collection uses the lenses of sociology, criminology, art, literary criticism and political science to critically examine varied processes of racialization, criminalization and resistance in relation to borders with reference to multi-national contexts in the current period. a. a"

High rates of intermarriage, especially with Whites, have been viewed as an indicator that Asian Americans are successfully "assimilating," signaling acceptance by the White majority and their own desire to become part of the White mainstream. Comparing two types of Asian American intermarriage, interracial and interethnic, Kelly H. Chong disrupts these assumptions by showing that both types of intermarriages, in differing ways, are sites of complex struggles around racial/ethnic identity and cultural formations that reveal the salience of race in the lives of Asian Americans. Drawing upon extensive qualitative data, Chong explores how interracial marriages, far from being an endpoint of assimilation, are a terrain of life-long negotiations over racial and ethnic identities, while interethnic (intra-Asian) unions and family-making illuminate Asian Americans’ ongoing efforts to co-construct and sustain a common racial identity and panethnic culture despite interethnic differences and tensions. Chong also examines the pivotal role race and gender play in shaping both the romantic desires and desirability of Asian Americans, spotlighting the social construction of love and marital choices. Through the lens of intermarriage, Love Across Borders offers critical insights into the often invisible racial struggles of this racially in-between "model minority" group -- particularly its ambivalent negotiations with whiteness and white privilege -- and on the group’s social incorporation process and its implications for the redrawing of color boundaries in the U.S.

This book addresses the centrality of race and racism in consolidating the nationalisms currently prominent in Brexit Britain. Particular attention is given to the issues of refugees, borders and bordering, and the wider forms of nativist and anti- Muslim sentiments that anchor today’s increasingly populist forms of nationalist politics. It is argued that the forms of scapegoating and alarmism integral to the revival of nationalism in British politics are fundamentally tied to racialised processes. Equally however, it is argued that such a political climate is not simply discursive, but also yields acute forms of governance, wherein an increasingly violent attention is given by the state to the border. The chapters in the book do however also attempt to think through the possibilities of a constructive response to this moment. Emphasis is given here to the everyday cultural textures that might help shape a popular opposition to racial nationalism. Similarly, the book attempts to unpack the appeal of today’s distinctive populism in ways that might be more responsive to anti-racist and anti-nationalist sentiments. Racial Nationalisms will be of interest to academics and researchers studying postcolonialism, nationalism, ethnic and racial studies, and to advanced students of sociology, political science and public policy. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies.