White Borders

“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

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.