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White Borders: The History of Race and Immigration in the United States from Chinese Exclusion to the Border Wall ** Shortlisted for the 2022 Stowe Prize ** Order here: Amazon; Indiebound; Barnes & Noble; Penguin Random House; Walmart; Hudson Booksellers; Target; Booksamillion; Bookshop.org Add on goodreads |
Media coverage:
“Facing Up to the Racist Legacy of America's Immigration Laws,” The New York Times
“The Hate Groups Behind the Think Tanks,” 2022, Yes! Magazine.
“How the Statue of Liberty became a symbol for a national myth,” CNN.com, op-ed
“The White Supremacist ‘Great Replacement Theory’ Has Deep Roots,” Teen Vogue,
“150 years ago, a mob attacked Los Angeles’s Chinese community,” Washington Post,
“The century-old law that inaugurated Biden’s border problems,” The Washington Post “Made by History,” guest essay
"For years, America has heavily favored white immigrants while actively barring immigrants of color,” Ali Velshi/MSNBC,
“Nativism, Immigration, and Environmentalism,” Against the Grain/KPFA, interview.
Interview on Janus Adams Show.
"Immigration as Racial Exclusion with Reece Jones" Cleveland Heights Library.
"White Borders" Redirect Podcast.
"White Borders Author Q & A" Political Research Associates.
"The Best Books on Immigration and Race" An interview with Five Books
"The Racist History of Border and Immigration Enforcement" A Q & A with the Border Chronicle
“Reece Jones and Iason Apostolopoulos: Violent Borders,” Design in Transition/Diseño en Transición, podcast interview
"White Borders" UH Better Tomorrow Speakers Series, Podcast
"A Conversation with Reece Jones on Racism and Immigration" UH Better Tomorrow Speakers Series, Video
“White Borders explores America’s long history of racially exclusive immigration policies,” Hawaii Public Radio, interview
Reviews:
Starred Review "A highly recommended, in-depth history of migration that accounts for lives affected by American border policing and immigration restrictions."— Library Journal
"White Borders reads less like a history and more like a compelling novel. Jones is adept at drawing out the background and character of our past while connecting it to recent events" — Englewood Review
"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
"A critical examination of U.S. immigration policies across the centuries as instruments of racism. ... Jones engages in good investigative journalism to chase down the sources of Trumpthink, ... 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. An incisive account ... The author’s ability to connect the dots is impressive—and depressing, since the politics of ethnic hatred persist."— Kirkus Reviews
Endorsements:
"White Borders is a searing indictment of 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
"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
“With eloquent prose and masterful storytelling, Reece Jones narrates the hard history of immigration policies of the U.S. 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 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 whiteness itself.”
—Brendan O'Connor, author of Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right
Description:
A gripping narrative that unearths the racial history of American immigration restrictions from Chinese Exclusion through the Trump Presidency. While most Americans assume there have always been rules about who could enter the country, the reality is that first national immigration law was not passed until 1875, ninety-nine years after the Declaration of Independence. As the first non-white Chinese immigrants arrived, Congress passed laws to ban them. In each era that followed, the fear of “the great replacement” of whites with non-white immigrations drove the push for more restrictions.
Although the United States is often mythologized as a nation of immigrants, the mainstreaming of anti-immigrant politics by Donald Trump in 2016 was a reversion to the ugly norm of the past. Since the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619, the English Colonies that became the United States were based on the dual foundation of open immigration for whites from Northern Europe and racial exclusion of slaves from Africa, Native Americans, and, eventually, immigrants from other parts of the world. White Borders exposes the connections between the Chinese Exclusion laws of the 1880s, the “Keep America American” nativism of the 1920s, and the “Build the Wall” chants of the 2010s.
By presenting new information and historical perspectives, White Borders situates the current crackdown on immigration in the long history of racial exclusion in the United States. Along the way, it introduces us to a bizarre cast of characters such as John Tanton, Cordelia Scaife May, and Stephen Miller who have moved fringe ideas about “white genocide” and “race suicide” into the mainstream of the American political discourse. This stunning exposé shows that while immigration crackdowns are justified as protecting American jobs and workers, they have always been about saving the fleeting idea of a white America.