Kelly Lytle Hernández Concludes Yearlong Inquiry Into U.S. Immigration History

Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, the 2025–26 Nannerl Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor at Duke and UNC–Chapel Hill, will return to Duke’s campus on April 16 to deliver her final public lecture, “Half a Loaf: Reform and the Whites Only Immigration Régime, 1965–2025.” 

The event, organized by the Duke Department of History in partnership with the Duke Center for Documentary Studies, will take place at 5:30 p.m. at the Nasher Museum of Art, with a reception to follow. The event is free, but registration is required.

Final Lecture Confronts Endurance of Racialized U.S. Immigration System

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In her culminating talk, Lytle Hernández will examine how reforms during the Civil Rights era failed to dismantle the core architecture and racialized foundations of the U.S. immigration system. 

A leading scholar of race, immigration and mass incarceration, Lytle Hernández will offer historical analysis connecting past policy decisions to contemporary debates.

The lecture will draw from her forthcoming book, “Racist by Design: Two Centuries of Immigration Control,” to be published by W. W. Norton later this year.

Building Momentum: A Year of Engagement Across the Triangle

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The Nannerl Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professorship brings prominent scholars to UNC–Chapel Hill and Duke for a one-year period, during which they deliver a lecture series and engage students and faculty around areas of shared interest to both institutions. 

Lytle Hernández opened her Keohane lecture series in September at UNC with “Emancipation and the Origins of U.S. Immigration Control, 1803–1875,” which traced the emergence of U.S. immigration control as a racial project in the 19^th century.

Her work continued during her February visit to Duke, when she delivered “The Whites-Only Immigration Regime, 1896–1952” to a full audience at the Karsh Alumni and Visitors Center. Throughout the week, she met with faculty, students, archivists, artists, community organizers and scholars from across the Triangle, sparking dialogue across documentary studies, history, human rights, law, literature and Latin American & Caribbean studies.

In her Duke lecture, she explained how federal authorities constructed a racially stratified immigration system in the early 20^th century and used “whites‑only” as a framework for understanding its design. She highlighted major components of the system — from guest worker programs and geographic exclusions to visa controls, the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol, and the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act.

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“As consolidated and codified in the first half of the 20^th century,” she said, “the nation’s whites-only immigration regime has made it easier, quicker, cheaper and safer for Europeans and their descendants [to migrate] into the United States, while making it far more difficult, delayed, expensive and dangerous for many non-white migrants to do so.”

Her April 16 lecture will offer Duke, UNC and Triangle communities the concluding chapter of her yearlong inquiry.

More About Kelly Lytle Hernández

Raised in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands during a period of rapidly expanding immigration enforcement, Lytle Hernández has built a career examining race, policing and the targeting of Mexicans and other Latinos by U.S. immigration authorities. She holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA and is the founder of Million Dollar Hoods, a research project mapping the fiscal and human costs of mass incarceration in Los Angeles.

A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, she is also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of American Historians and the Pulitzer Prizes Board. Her award winning books include “Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands” and “City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles.”