Historical

How did this come to be? What were the conditions, struggles, and contingencies that produced the current arrangement?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

This is a history of laws. Not because law is where life happens, but because in this story the statute is the machine: who may enter, who may naturalize, who may be sent back, and who is a permanent guest. Read in order, the acts below show race being manufactured in public, on the record, by recorded votes. The Page Act draws the line through women’s bodies; Chinese Exclusion names a people; the 1924 quota pegs the nation to the 1890 census so that the wrong Europeans cannot come; 9066 empties the coast without naming anyone; Bracero imports the workers that Operation Wetback expels in the same fields the same year; and 1965, the liberal reform, invents the modern undocumented population by accident. It runs alongside Anti-Blackness and Racial Capitalism, which traces the other mechanism.

Anchor questions

• The Irish, Italians, and Jews arrived as despised races and are now simply white. Who let them in, and what did admission cost, and who paid it?
• Why does the law keep drawing the line in different places? What does that tell you about the line?
• Bracero imported workers while Operation Wetback deported them, in the same fields, in the same years. How is that one policy?
• 1965 was the liberal victory that abolished the racist quota. How did it produce the modern “illegal immigrant”?
• Executive Order 9066 never says “Japanese.” Why not, and what does the omission accomplish?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. “Free to borrow” means a free Internet Archive account and a renewable loan.

The expansion of whiteness

Whiteness was not a fact about complexions. It was a membership, and the door opened.

• Noel Ignatiev (1940 to 2019), How the Irish Became White (1995). The Irish arrived despised as a race apart and became white by buying into the Democratic machine, the trade unions, and anti-Black violence. Whiteness here is not a complexion but a membership, sold on political terms and paid for at someone else’s expense. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: routledge.com, and see the note on access for how to get it. Ignatiev on the same politics, free and hosted by his own publisher: blog.pmpress.org
• David R. Roediger (b. 1952), Working Toward Whiteness (2005). Southern and eastern Europeans move from “inbetween people” to suburban whiteness through housing policy, unions, and the state. The companion to his Wages of Whiteness, which sits in the anti-Blackness theme. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: hachettebookgroup.com. Roediger lays out the thesis in a free interview published by the UE union: ueunion.org
• Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks (1998). How the GI Bill, FHA loans, and the suburbs reclassified Jews as white after 1945, told by an anthropologist through her own family. The clearest case of the state doing the reclassifying. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: rutgersuniversitypress.org. Brodkin restated the argument herself in a free essay: forward.com

The law as a race-making machine

• Ellen D. Wu, The Color of Success (2013). The turn from “yellow peril” to “model minority” runs through wartime incarceration, Hawaii statehood, and Cold War image-management. The model minority was manufactured, and manufactured as a weapon against Black claims. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: press.princeton.edu
• Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects (2004). The 1924 quota regime did not just restrict immigration, it produced the “illegal alien” as a permanent caste, racializing Mexicans and Asians through the law itself. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: press.princeton.edu. Ngai gives the thesis in a free lecture, extremely niche at about 1,000 views but the author unabridged: youtube.com

Primary sources: read the statutes

The whole argument of this theme is available in the documents. They are short, and they say what they are doing.

• Page Act (1875). The first federal restriction, barring “Oriental” women on a presumption of prostitution. Two pages, and the racial border is drawn through women’s bodies seven years before anyone is barred by name. Free: loveman.sdsu.edu
• Chinese Exclusion Act (1882). The first US law to bar a group by name. Free: archives.gov
• Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed). The national-origins quota, pegged to the 1890 census for the express purpose of keeping the composition of the country as it had been before the wrong Europeans arrived. Free: immigrationhistory.org
• Executive Order 9066 (1942). Read it and notice it never says “Japanese.” Free: archives.gov
• Korematsu v. United States (1944). The Court blessing it. Assign Murphy’s dissent, which names it “the legalization of racism,” and ask why the majority could not see what he saw. Free: law.cornell.edu
• Mexican Farm Labor Agreement (1942) and Operation Wetback (1954). Read together, or they make no sense: the state imported the workers it was simultaneously deporting, in the same fields, in the same decade. Free: the Bracero agreement and Operation Wetback
• Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler). The reform that ended the racist quota, and, through hemispheric caps, manufactured Mexican illegality at scale. The best argument in the theme against reading history as progress. Free: immigrationhistory.org

Film

• The Chinese Exclusion Act (Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu, PBS American Experience, 2018, 160 min). The only US law to bar a named people, and what it did to those already here. Streams free: pbs.org

Further reading

For resources behind a paywall, see the note on access.

• Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998). Whiteness itself repeatedly redrawn: from a broad 1790 ‘free white persons’ to a fractured hierarchy of Celts and Hebrews and Mediterraneans and back to a consolidated Caucasian. Not free: hup.harvard.edu
• Library of Congress, A Latinx Resource Guide: the Bracero Program. A curated primary-source guide to the guest-worker program, for a group that wants to research the period itself rather than read about it. Free: guides.loc.gov

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially on Filipino racialization and the colonial ambiguity of US nationals, the 1930s expulsion of Mexicans and Mexican Americans (many of them citizens), and immigration and race outside the United States.