thank you for spending your evening or afternoon with us wherever you are. my name is francesca my producer she hurt hers, and i'm a grad google impact intern at the international house that you chicago. the mission of international houses to enable students and scholars from around the world to live and learn together in a diverse community that builds live long qualities of leadership respect and friendship found dead in 1932 by john d. rockefeller jr. international house of chicago is today one of 20 members of the international houses worldwide network. in addition to supporting the graduate student community through our graduate commons program international house also serves the greater chicago community as a cultural and intellectual center for a wide array of programs. close to 100 public programs are held each year at international house through the global voices performing arts and lecture series and as we begin the autumn quarter, we'll be providing virtual in-person a hackgrid programming. you can learn more about the different types of events that i house that you chicago.edu. the global voices performing arts and lecture series includes outreach programs with chicago area international organizations collaborations with foreign consulates music and cultural performances and discussions and debates played by distinguished guest speakers, including those for today's program that we are so pleased to co-sponsor with seminary co-op bookstores. racist and anti-immigration policies from the border wall to the muslim ban have left many americans wondering how did we get here and a sweeping account rhys jones reveals. that although the us is often my mythologized as a nation of immigrants. it has a long history of immigration restrictions that are rooted in the racist fear of the quote unquote great replacement of whites with non-white immigrants. connecting pasture present jones uncovers the link between the chinese exclusion laws of the 1880s the keep american america american nativism of the 1920s and the quote-unquote bill the wall chance initiated by former president trump in 2016. through gripping stories and end up analysis jones exposes it lasting impacts of white supremacist ideas department of geography and environment rhys jones is at 20201 guggenheim fellow and a professor and the chair of the department of geography and environment at the university of hawaii. he has research immigration for over 20 years. and is the author of border walls and violent borders. over 2,000 journal or articles and four edited books. he is also editor-in-chief of the journal and geopolitics and lives honolulu with his family. tonight's conversation will be moderated by john washington who writes about immigration and border politics as well was criminal justice and literature. washington is also a translator having co-translated. most recently the hollywood kid by oscar martinez and juan martinez and blood barrios by albert arce which washington is also a translator having co-translated. most recently the hollywood kid by oscar martinez and juan martinez and blood barrios by albert arce which won a pen translates award. following the presentation there will be an opportunity for questions. so please don't meet those via the q&a function here on the zoom. now, please help me in welcoming wiz one orders from seminary co-op bookstores. now, please help me in welcoming wiz jones and john, washington. thanks so much francesca great to be in conversation with you reese. you you did a lot of my job. francesca is is laying out this book. so i feel like we're starting in a really good spot. what i'd like to do is just do a little bit of framing of this conversation and then just jump into some questions and and recent i are going to kind of go back and forth about this this really terrific book, which i'll hold up here for y'all white borders. so if you look at um reese's work at his titles a couple of which francesca just mentioned you have border walls violent borders a recent anthology called open borders and now white borders. you very well might think that his work was pretty siled into borders and in some regards that is consistently very much the focus, but i think that would be misunderstanding two different things and one is that the nature of borders and the nature of modern bordering really? both overlaps and gets at so many other issues. i mean you can look at race as is evident in the title of recismos recent book gender class. economy geopolitics every level of geopolitics climate crises etc and so borders really is revealing of all of those issues and second. i think along the same lines, you know if you read and and spend time with reese's work and you start getting through his like very original analyzes of a lot of these issues as well as his uncovered histories, which this book does it just impeccable job at at laying out. to see that i think rather recuses the border uses immigration politics to illuminate. politics in general and i think even more than that almost like human nature. um, and so that's you know, one of those most excellent things about getting into into reese's work. so i come to reese's scholarship from a very specific place as a journalist. i've very happily been able to lean on reese for some quotes to encapsulate a you know, certain political moment or use some of this context from his books to understand a new policy move. reese is an academic but what is really striking about white borders about violent borders and and all of his other books is how incredibly accessible it is, you know, not every academic has the narrative chops to really capture a on a page. or to hook a reader in like with like a dramatic shift or like a sweeping description of long historical period even a lovely turn of phrase. these like really illuminating sort of capsule biographies and yet that's what reese's work does. it's it's incredibly accessible and it's in some ways almost like page turning at times which is special and and i say that not just to heat praise unrees but there's something that i think is really important to remind to remember to this is worth it was worth just thinking about for another moment is that the accessibility is crucial because these are urgent matters. you know, this isn't like it could be written in such a way that it's this arcane academic style. that is almost illegible to the vast majority of of the but it's not. it really drives home the the emergency that the world is dealing with and the world is trying to do it through bordering and that's that's you know, causing greater harms. and and that is something special. i think that reese both humanizes the issues and the people that he discusses and and really makes you understand the consequences. so i could just like sing as praises for a while, but i want to do one more sort of framing introductory little feel quickly and then just get into some questions. so this is just the context of where we are immediately and i think it's important to recall this in almost any conversation on these issues. right now there are just drive a hundred million people who are forcibly displace a hundred million people forcibly displaced around the globe. they are refugees or asylum seekers. there are a third of a billion 300 some million international migrants so those are some big picture numbers some smaller picture numbers. there's over 20,000 people currently detained in just awful squalid immigration detention centers throughout the united states. i'm currently in arizona. i know right now that there's hundreds or thousands of people who are as we're sitting here. hiding in the desert because they're trying to migrate to find opportunity or safety. i know that people are being deported to mexico to other places to libya to incredibly dangerous places where they are thrown into the hands of corrupt and brutal security forces or criminal networks. and this is the reality and this is the absolute urgency of this situation, and i'm just like so thankful that reese brings this huge wealth of historical context to this moment. and so, you know, all those things are sort of what drive me very often to write about it or to feel like i need to uncover some current issue. and reason i have talked about this and he sort of addresses in the book, but i wonder if that's a good spot to start reese if you could you know one sort of explain what brought you to this specific issue of white borders and you know, maybe just kind of do some sort of summarizing of what your project was in this in this new offering. yeah, well first off thanks francesca for the introduction and thanks to the seminary co-op and the people at the international house for inviting us. i'm really excited to be here and tell you about white borders things. also john for such a kind introduction to the book. you know, really you can just keep talking. i think if you're gonna keep talking about it like that. i'm happy to just turn this over to you. but but seriously, you know, i i started writing this book in the context of my previous book violent borders, which you mentioned here and and gets into the issue of migrant deaths and why there's so many people why borders have become so violent over the past few decades in a global context so that book came out in october of 2016. so a month before donald trump was elected president. and so i watched his campaign in his election with that book in my mind and a lot of those topics that i've been talking about in that book. suddenly we're being turned into these red meat issues for his base in very racialized terms and so in that book i talk about borders as being a mechanism for protecting privileges and i talk about cultural privileges and identity but the book is a lot about economics as well. and so i decided i needed to go back and really think about the relationship between race and immigration. you know, i knew there were chinese exclusion laws, but i'd always seen those represented as kind of an aberration as if it was something that yeah, it happened, but that wasn't really you know, the signifying the entire sweep of american immigration laws and but what i found when i went back and looked at all of these laws and looked at the language around them as they're being put in place and they really the the language we see today framing immigrants as a threat and talking about an invasion talking about diseases talking about drugs talking about taking american jobs talking about them immigrants replacing white americans. that's the same sort of language that characterizes all of the immigration laws that have been passed in the us. yeah, you mentioned like protecting privileges that seems to be a one side of the coin like but is the other side of the coin? oppressing the minority or maybe maybe those are i mean, i think those are the same the same coin just both sides one thing that that really struck me, you know, this is a lot of the history that i've read around in the past my own work. but you know, it's those nice to have it kind of see the through line here. and you miss a lot when you read around like that until you see a comprehensive take on it and the thing that really jumped out at me. was that citizenship law prohibited anyone but a free white person in the united states from obtaining citizenship until 1952. is that right? and can you talk a little bit about how that law came about and how possibly a lasted so long? yeah, i was also shocked when i realized that that phrase had remained in naturalization and citizenship law in the us until 1952 when it was finally removed. it was it was first put in in 1790 in the first naturalization law, which says that you have to you can be a free white person and have resided in the us for two years to become a citizen of the us and in the 1870s or 1860s up to 1870 freed slaves were added to that definition. so people of african nativity but free white person remained in the rules all the way until 1952, so it's really not until the civil rights movement that we start to see a questioning of these categories that had been the foundations of who could belong in the united states and rethinking of that relationship between race and citizenship and immigration. so a lot of immigration laws that i talk about in the book are very much. in the context of that citizenship right that the us is really founded as a white country. it's a place for free white people to become citizens, and it's not until the first groups of non-white immigrants start to show up that the us starts to be very aggressive in implementing immigration laws about who can actually enter the united states. yeah, so i mean, i guess sort of like a two-part question here one is so but did it stay on the books as an overlooked aberration? i mean that sounds like a little naive to ask but i just wonder if you know about who was keeping that there and wanting? you know to limit the who could naturalize until the middle of last century. and then, you know a related question. i'd love to hear you talk a little bit about another really shocking fact that came out in your book was the exact timing of the creation of the us border patrol. that i i don't have it from you right now. my camera is a few days after. the i think the implementation of the clearly racist quota law of 19 both came in 1924. yes, it is. i mean are things always that transparent if you actually just read through the laws and find out what is actually on the books and we're just not aware of it or or yeah, and those are two two big questions. so the border patrol i mean the the first federal agents to patrol us borders and for people crossing without authorization. we're actually set up in 1904 and they were called mounted chinese inspectors. so they literally rode around border towns looking for people with chinese appearance and checking their documents to see if they were allowed to be in the us and then by 1924 when the us passed the national origins quotas. it's often called the johnson reed immigration act which put in these really strict limits on who could enter to the us. all asian immigration was banned and immigration from even southern and eastern europe with severely restricted and the idea was to switch immigration prevent merrily to people from northern europe. and yes, the border patrol was established two days after that was signed into law. the border patrol was literally established to be a racial immigration force to in enforce these eugenics derived rules about who could enter the united states in 1924. yeah, so, you know, i guess we've been talking you mentioned the 1790 law which was the naturalization act. there's a big gap between that and 1924 like you know another really important century in terms of immigration law or a german immigration policy took place over those intervening a hundred and thirty-some years, but it wasn't at a national national level. mostly. i'm curious like what was on the books what were border policies and immigration policies in that century. and and how did those how do those fit into this racist paradigm? yeah, i think this is another thing that a lot of people don't know about or have misconceptions about i think there's a perception that the united states has always had immigration laws had rules about who could enter the country and but that's just simply not the case the constitution actually bans any limits on immigration until 1808 that was primarily about keeping slavery and allowing slaves to be continued to be brought into the country, but it says you can't have any limits on who enters the country until 1808 after 1808 a few states started to implement their own restrictions about who could enter those states primarily, massachusetts in new york had limits for the poor. so these would they would have inspectors at the ships coming from europe and ensure that absolutely destitute people would be turned back and sent back to europe, but those tended to only turn back less than 1% of the people who arrived so they weren't large-scale bands on who or the us and in the 1820s southern states started to implement bands on free blacks entering their territory and the fear being that free blacks. could insight rebellion, right the that were already starting to happen, right? i mean in haiti, of course and the the idea was the people who were inspired by those movements would try to do something similar in the south and so southern states put limits like that all of these state-scale limits though were ruled unconstitutional and in 1849. there was a set of cases called the passenger cases, which said that only the federal government could regulate interstate constitution and immigration issues interstate commerce. i'm sorry, and that was reiterated in 1875 and two different cases. so the reality is that there were no federal immigration rules in the united states until 1875 and as i argue in the book, it's not by chance. that's the time that these federal laws start to come into place and they're very tied to two separate things and that were happening at that time. the first is the aftermath of slavery and the idea of black citizenship and then the second is the arrival of the chinese. yeah one thing. yeah, that is so surprising and i think it is overlooked a lot that absence of national immigration law on that that long period you know one of the things one of the grapes one of the original grapes of the early colonialists against king george as written in the declaration of independence was that he was going to limit immigration to the united states. and so that like there was this almost call there was a call for more migration for what you may be able to call open borders very early on in our nation's founding. so there's then it seems like there's just been a pattern of paradox throughout immigration law. or some folks are wanted in and some folks are not or even like if you if you read through the history of various forms of chinese exclusion and points of wealth. is that there's a swaying sort of back and forth that happens and and is that driven mostly do you think by just burgeoning or potentially dipping racist attitudes or i mean it's hard to make sense of it if you look at just read through the timeline. it doesn't seem to follow any logical sense. so what's your reading about where this comes from? yeah, and so in the book in whiteboarders i make the argument that it's certainly tied to race and i think it connects to the free white person's citizenship idea that we were talking about before and so it's the moment after the civil war where slaves or freed and by 1870 they get citizenship in the united states and the white community at that time has this kind of reckoning with this new situation. that was not what was i think intended at the start and and we see i think three different reactions to that and all three of them are negative, right? the first is the reimposition of a hierarchy in us society and through things like jim crow laws through segregation through violence like the kkk and that reinstates that white order in fact, even if on paper people are given citizenship. i think the second thing you see in the aftermath of black citizenship is efforts to remove african-americans from the united states. this is something that had started even during the during the the era of slavery with a group called the american colonization society, which was organized to move freed slaves back to africa. the country of liberia is set up for that purpose and another of those facts that was amazing to me as i was researching that is that the american colonization society didn't actually disband until 1964 and and even in the 1930s southern senators introduce acts into the senate for example, the greater liberia act which if it had been passed would have sought to remove all african americans from the united states within 20 years. so there was this consistent effort to deport non-white people. and the third reaction was the realization that they did not want to create a new race problem and as they they called it at the time in the book one of the characters that i introduced is james blaine, who was he's probably the most famous person of the 1870s and 1880s who never quite became president. he was the speaker of the house of representatives. he was a senator from maine and he was the secretary of state twice in the 1880s and 1890s and he ran for president two different times and in 1884. he was the republican nominee for president and grover cleveland just barely beat him in the election the popular vote was tied, but cleveland narrowly won the four swing states and so one and the the in the electoral college, but james blaine was kind of the earliest republican senator who spoke out against the chinese arrival and he gives this speech on the senate floor about how if the history of race relations in the country is any lesson than the last thing the us wants to do is to create new relations with foreign peoples. and so for him, the easier solution is to stop the immigration. and so we see this rash of chinese exclusion laws with that. the first one is the 1885 page act which attempts to stop chinese laborers from calming but it does stop chinese women from being able to immigrate to the us and then in 1882 is the big one, which is the chinese exclusion act that effectively bans all chinese from entering the united states. yeah, you know the american colonization that it was an actual group until the 60s but 60 early 60s, you know. it sounds crazy like that. that would be anathema today in popular culture and yet like really what is the difference between a group that publicly pushes a policy like that and massive levels of deportations or you know, remember mitt romney's idea of self-deportations or sb-1070 the 2010, arizona law that their policy goal was attrition through enforcement making life so miserable here that people would leave. you know a lot of these things seem at first blush antiquated maybe the language that uses different but this isn't a historical problem. i mean, can you talk about ways that this manifests today? and i mean our our is racism guiding our immigration laws and policies of say the biden administration or at least, you know 21st century immigration policy. yeah, i think so. i mean the short answer is yes, right. i mean if you look at something like title 42, which is a health regulation, but it's used to to remove people from the united states without even considering asylum claims at the border. and if you look at how it's been used, it's towards people like the group of over 10,000 haitian people who arrived right black immigrants arriving asking for asylum, but not even having that asylum considered and instead immediately deported out of the country and you know, really, i think i appreciate you asking me about this question, but maybe you are actually the the expert on this topic right? i mean your your book the this possessed is all about this kind of asylum practices and you know in the book you tell the story of a man. i'm not sure i can pronounce his name, but you you could tell us some about that, but i wanted to maybe throw that question back at you and and have you talk a little bit about what you think about. the racialized asylum practices now yeah a lot to address there and i feel like just looking at the treatment the recent treatment of the haitians a lot of people were rightly. just aghast and disgusted about the treatment that was captured on camera, but it's not surprising at all, and it's nosd at specifically the haitians. i mean. haitian migrants have borne the brunt of some of the worst and most brutal immigration policies over the past 50 years. to rattle off a couple quick just reminders about what that looked like is the creation of guantanamo bay as first an immigration detention center. was after a a ship of haitians in 19, i think it was. i always been a little while since i look at it lately 70s. maybe 77 arrives took guantanamo bay enable station. not a division center that point asking for help and instead of helping them. they were detained and that set precedent for throughout the 80s and 90s attaining mostly haitians, but also cuban refugees and then after 2001 it became, you know a absolute dumping ground in black site for so-called enemy combatants. you know why haitians then why that mistreatment of patients then i mean they are like a haitias as stood as a pivotal. um place in this hemisphere for a long time you mentioned fear over something like the revolutionary spirit spreading to enslave black people in the united states and that took place in haiti. the number of times that the us went and took over and invaded 80 in the 20th centuries. it's hard to hard to keep track of hard to remember how many times one other thing worth mentioning and this is i'm just kind of just putting a couple data points in here is one of the first enacted immigration policy changes after september 11th attacks, whatever 11th was to deny parole to all haitian asylum seekers most of whom were held in chrome detention centering in in, florida. you know haitians obviously had zero to do with the attacks the the twin towers or elsewhere, but it was the immediate. sort of place that the united states government went it was like the punching bag to work out their their angst or their anger or whatever and that has been something that's happened for a long time. you know, there's there's so much so much to talk about there, you know one thing i would like to pull it back to you and and that we could talk about immigration in general or i think this also ties very much into asylum and refugee policies. is you know the united states is the cell professor world leader of many things they to lead the world at least in part by example in their the way that they enforce immigration and border policies refugee asylum policies. do other countries have such overtly even if it's not always recognized racist immigration policies? yes, i think you can say the answer is yes to that, you know a country like japan for example denies 99% of asylum requests each year grant granting just a handful per year europe as well is engaging in a widespread hardening of the edges of the european union to prevent the migration of people and that looks like border walls going up. it looks like patrols in the mediterranean forcing people to take ever more dangerous roots resulting in tens of thousands of migrant deaths, which is what i look at in my previous book violent borders, and it also looks like pushing people back across the border. so when people arrive at a border in greece or poland getting pushed back across and not even allowed to hear their asylum claim so so i think it is a widespread phenomena australia as well. i think you can make some similar. arguments and they have the offshore detention facilities as well. i think just in the last few weeks australia signed a indefinite agreement with nauru to hold immigrants who are detained offshore there. so it it is a global phenomenon. yeah, that that those pushbacks is like the the technical term form is when folks are trying to arrive to a place and ask for refuge or you know some sort of legal status and they're back beforehand that that came also from a policy implemented specifically against the haitians in the 19. well the late 80s and early 1990s and there's a supreme court case that basically gave the okay the thumbs up to continue to do that and that was the model that australia then followed and and as well as other countries. so i wonder i think yeah, just one last thought on that. i mean, i think we're really are right now witnessing the end of the era of refugee and asylum rules that had been in place for 50 years where although it was inadequate in terms of addressing the refugee situation. they're at least was a system for resettling refugees and for dealing with at least some fraction of the people that are displaced by violence in their homes and but we see that being completely eroded now, right? i mean the us and this year despite biden becoming the president and having six months to do something about it. let in the lowest number of refugees ever since we've had the refugee refugee act. so so there i think we're at a moment where that system is is falling out and something else is going to replace it. and right now it looks like that system is just going to be violence and walls and pushing people out and not having a way to address this fundamental need. of people on the move right, i mean so the the us refugee act was signed in 1980 that we followed some sort of sort of like slapdash system before that after world war two but at least since then until recently there there the felt it seemed like administration felt somewhat beholden to the rule of law in terms of immigration refugee policies. and in through since the trump administration and in you know, this this so far in the abide administration, it seems like all that's just out the window. it doesn't seem to be anything really holding them back from into implementing policies better clearly violations of their own as well as international laws. yeah, absolutely. i mean still according to us law it is legal to request asylum and you have to set foot in the united states to do that. so, you know, but but you're right there have been so many different ways that that's been eroded and challenged and sadly the vitaministration hasn't undone a lot of that but there's no doubt that the trump administration spent a lot of time implementing those rules and that's one of the things i talk about at the end of white borders is to kind of think about after 1965 when immigration law was changed and the racial rules were removed how this kind of racialized immigration policies re-emerged into the political sphere in the us and i tell that through the story of john tanton. mm-hmm. yeah, so which brings me to another question i have you know you on earth so many characters in this book and and like i said in the beginning you so with with great panache i think and really tell their stories well and succinctly canton gets some good treatment some other figures people may be aware of obviously steven miller jeff sessions, but also some some people that i certainly didn't know you mentioned lane before there's a number of other senators who are four or against different types of immigration throughout history, and i wonder just like it's it seems obvious. we need to understand. you know, what's driving stephen miller and how did he achieve the level of power to affect immigration law that is still being implemented today. but what do you see as an importance of really getting into some of those those that deeper history and some of those less well known and much longer dead folks. sorry not longer did but i didn't say that right? yeah. yeah, i think one thing is when i was working on this i found these people so fascinating and the the ways that they were talking and the things they were doing were just so intriguing to me, you know, one of the earlier ones is dennis kearney who is an immigrant from ireland and lives in san francisco. and in the 1870s, he's one of the kind of fire brand speakers about limiting the chinese arrivals and he goes on a tour in 1878 across the eastern us giving me speeches and the press can't get enough of it. right? so but if you look at what he does in these speeches, it's really a trump rally, right? he begins the rallies by by criticizing the press and getting the crowd to boo the press and the back and there's even a fight in one of the rallies where someone beats up someone from the media then he talks about the the problems of them and how that affects the working man and then he ends all of his is speeches by demonizing the chinese, right? and he ends every single one by saying and no matter what the chinese must go right and then walks off. the stage is the crowd goes wild and their rabbit nativism. so it was really the reason i wanted to tell some of these stories from the past is to see these parallels with the present right to talk about how although it felt like in a way that donald trump came out of nowhere and stephen miller seemed to have merged out of out of nothing to suddenly be this hugely influential person in his early 30s, and the reality is they were they were doing these things based on a whole series of things in the background that had laid the foundation for the for what they were doing in the present. so the language they were using and has these echoes in the past and then we mentioned john tanton, but i think you can't understand stephen miller without knowing who john tanton is because stephen miller's whole anti-immigrant philosophy is built on this network of organizations that john tansen built starting in the 1970s. yeah, the mcclatch keys to if i'm pronounced that right just i i just like recognize the name because the news service but just didn't know anything about those brothers and and their on virulent. it racist immigration policies of their spoused. um, you know, you mentioned just briefly. i just kind of want to say his name, but you mentioned the character that i profile in my book and then i profile my books. i don't know. these was a man from el salvador and he struggled to get into the united states to find safety a couple times with his daughter and one of the things that he told me. we spent a lot of time together and i got to know him pretty well. one thing. he told me is that when he crossed the board under the united states. he said i could feel it. i was less than human. i was less human. and and that you know that that's something that sticks with me and i think about that a lot when i see. when i read anything almost anything the news about immigration. and it feels like that is something that a lot of people are dealing with in the united states when they come and to confrontation with the law as well. and and i wonder like we have i think in the past few years with the rise of black lives matter and some like really good critical scholarship of policing. we've learned i feel like as a society really, you know, not everyone certainly are pushing back on this, but we've learned to understand the mechanics even the existence of policing. through a racialized once and we've also understand the consequences and we understand that people do our dehumanized or murdered. and it seems like the way that we still talk about it immigration policies and immigration policing. deaths are are termed as such they're not termed killings. really? um and the the understanding of why we enforce the borders or why we enforce immigration law is a sort of a strange not of different ideas, but we don't see it. i think largely through a racialized lens. we should i mean i think we should it seems very much like you think we should why not why haven't we got there? why haven't we hit that critical moment? yeah. yeah, and i mean that's certainly one of the goals of this book is to make the case that immigration policy is fundamentally about racial exclusion that it was the first immigration laws were about racial reasons right about stopping non-white people from coming in the us immigration police were set up to do that to prevent people with brown skin from entering the country and they are allowed to use racial profiling in carrying out that and then the results of it are racialized right the the impact of these rules creates the the population of the us as it is, right. so so it's very clearly needs to be seen through a racial lens. and i think it's probably most clear if you if you look at the ways that white supremacists talk about the issue for some reason we often have when we think about white supremacists in the us we often see them through the of white black relations, right and we think that the majority of what groups like the kkk are talking about. is that that relationship right about about black people in the us, but if you actually look at what they do and what they say they talk about immigration as much are more than they talk about race relations in the country and they see immigration as more of a threat to their ideals of white supremacy and that's evident in the long past in the lead up to the 1924 immigration act and the the second kkk that starts right before that is all about immigration as the biggest threat right there there slogan is a hundred percent americanism right to keep america american as calvin coolidge said in that election campaign in the 1970s david duke who was the grand dragon of the kkk and he would go to the border to carry out a clan border watch right. so saying that the us wasn't against borders and that the klan was going to be there to do it for the us right in some ways pre-saging the ways that republican polishes politicians today all make their pilgrimages to the border to talk about these issues around the border. so that's something that the kkk was doing 40 years ago, right? so immigration has been this fundamental issue for white supremacist for a long time, and i think that it's the that's the lens to understand why you have to understand our immigration restrictions in racialized terms in terms of why we don't and i think that we are often taught in schools that that kind of one of the normal things that states have is a border and has immigration laws and it just seems it's treated it's kind of the the racial aspect of it is removed and it's presented as if it's just normal right? it's just normal to have armed at the border deport. and it's just normal to have to show a passport when you enter a country and but it's not what one last anecdote. i know it's probably getting close to time for for questions, but in in 1882 when the chinese exclusion act was passed by congress the president at the time chester arthur actually vetoed the first version of it, and he he did so one of his complaints was that it required a passport for people from china to enter the united states and he thought that to be way too onerous and so he vetoed it because it had a passport requirement and instead sent it back and they changed it to a certificate for people to enter the united states the us didn't require all people to have a passport to enter the country until world war two so and in europe passports, really only become a widespread thing after world war one so a lot of these things that are taken for granted ideas about the way that immigration should work and the way that borders work are not that old right, and and i what the case that i want to make in this book is that we need to think about them as tool of white supremacy. so i think that leads into one of the question i have for you and then we'll say some questions. but you know, what do we do? i mean, i think besides questioning it and reframing it very good important steps. i wonder if there's something either more concrete or or i know that's a hard hard question to answer. but i wondered too like without trying to ask you to prognosticate, you know from like as you as you write in violent borders, like the borders are proliferating like the number of borders. throughout the globe are far higher than they were 40 years ago. like with the normalization of bordering like is there any of and with going back to my my framing and introduction with the obvious and and in coming increase huge increase in a number of forcibly displaced people? you know, are we just going to see more people run up against border walls and and you know shot down by border guards or detained and deported or is there a way out of this this really dire near future? and if so, what how do we do it? yeah. i think the near future is a little bit dire, and i think you know if i'm predicting for the next five to ten years. there's going to be more i think more more violence more walls more more. border police and more people on the move right? and so it's going to be a lot more detention camps and it's going to be i think not not a pretty situation for the next five to ten years and but i would push back though with the the other point that even though in the public sphere we often talk about immigration in these policing terms and and the voices the anti-immigrant voices are very loud, right and get a lot of media attention and for whatever reason the media tends to to use their framing often right of crisis of threat of danger of you know out of control and things like that and but if you look at other things like that pew has done a poll for almost 20 years about americans' perceptions of immigrants and that has swung heavily towards being pro immigrant and in 2001, i think 53% of people said that they thought immigration to the us should should decreased and only 10% thought it should be increased and in the latest version of that poll the number who think it's increased is in the 30% tiles and decreased is down to 20 percent, right? so there's been a fundamental shift in the public's opinion as a whole towards a more positive view of immigration, but that isn't reflected in the that we see happening. the scholar windy brown wrote a book about border walls over a decade ago and she's changed her view a little bit on it, but i think there's some some value to what she says. she says that the walls that we see in the violent supporters and is really the signs of the older system of the state as the fundamental political unit kind of in the last rose of trying to reimpose it's control and and it you know building a wall and putting much of guards there to shoot at people because they're not obeying your laws and it shows that they don't have a lot of respect for those laws, right and and she sees it. as a kind of as the last parts of this state system as we're transitioning into a new world and a new system of organization, and it's going to be messy and it's going to be violent but it also suggests that maybe in the longer term maybe 50 years from now the world would look a lot different than it does today and that we might not have the same sort of state sovereignty that we have in the in the present moment. he yeah, that is a really interesting book and yeah a good point and maybe even a sliver of hope to to end on as we go go to some questions. i guess i will just read them out. the first question is from christopher chavez. is this right francesca? that's okay. you can read them if you want it mr. that's totally fine. that's what i'm here for, but you're good. you already got it you oh, yeah. all right. i'm from douglas from christopher douglas, arizona. not too far from me right now. it seems that many of the ranchers in that area are always ready to talk in terms of quote crisis on the border. even if there is none. how can the media critically question these disingenuous accounts by those in the border that want to quote permanent crisis to justify racism antihispanic sediment in arizona since they were in arizona before the whites but whites came into the 19th century. yeah, you know, i mean we kind of touched a little bit on that just a second ago and to say that the will i would back up and say you know it kind of i've hinted towards john tanton several times in this and i think it's it's again here to to mention his name the whole really the whole second half of the book is kind of tracing the impacts that john tanton had and what he did in just in a snapshot was to start a bunch of groups in the 1970s 80s and 90s that would pursue an anti-immigrant position in american politics because he found in the 1970s. no one was really doing that and and so his goal was to kind of reinvigorate the anti-immigrant position in the american political spectrum. and so he created all these groups so that they can quote each other they can talk to each other and it can seem like there's this broad grassroots movement a grout against immigrants and most specifically find to give quotes to the media right to provide a study that shows a negative impact of immigration to absolin their works for a group. it's called something like the center for immigration studies to say immigration is really bad, and there's a crisis at the border. and so that those groups have been really good at shaping the way that the media talks about these things and and additionally the media likes crisis right that you know, if if things are boring and quiet they don't want to report on that, right? they need something that's going to be a story to tell not you john. you're you're the good media, right? we're talking about the other the other media right? but but it's true right. i mean, you know all quiet on the us export order just isn't a headline right so crisis at the border is is a headline. so so i think all of those things combine to have the border reported in a way that just isn't accurate of what's actually happening there and you know, the you all who arizona know this better than i do. but i mean i visit the border frequently. i walk along the border all the time. the border is not in crisis, right? it is a it is a quiet place. it's a sleepy place most border patrol agents have relatively little to do and i i've just written another book about the border patrol which will come out next year and in july and one thing i calculated was how many apprehensions the average border patrol agent made from 2010 to 2020 and it worked out to one apprehension every 11 days on duty, right? so imagine that right there, they're working. they're out there for eight hour shifts work days and for 10 days in a row 80 hours, they find no one right one average and then on that 11th day, they apprehend one person, right? so the other way to think about that, it's like two apprehensions a month for the average border patrol agent, right? so and so there is no crisis at the border, right? even the numbers we've seen over the last year of high. of apprehensions. it's still nowhere near the level of apprehensions in the year 2000 or the average in the 1970s or eighties when the border patrol had only a fraction as many agents as they do now. so it's it's as the the questionnaire. i'm sorry. i forgot his name. christopher is suggesting it is a manufactured crisis, right that serves the border patrol to get more funding for them. it serves right-wing politicians who can go down there and give speeches and kind of rile up their base about this danger and it certainly serves the border security industry who is profited enormously from the expansion of infrastructure for enforcement at the border. yeah, or i i, you know agree with all that reese and it also just calls in the question who gets to claim crisis. i mean so board virtual agents our border patrol spokesman or virtual union leaders claim crisis and so to mostly right-wing politicians. get to claim crisis and so do some people who have their fences cut on the border the ranchers claim crisis and yet what is the crisis for the haitians who were deported back to haiti after yet another earthquake after you know the assassination of the president by us trained colombian mercenaries or what is the crisis for people in immigration detention centers? wherever they are, you know those to me, i mean if you think about the word crisis. this the culminating event that could lead to. death or you know as some form of misery, i mean, absolutely these people are living in crisis, but that is not the crisis that makes the headlines typically. yeah, i mean to i you think like the the this goes, you know to the other to another point like claim often that you know, there is chaos on the border or they're there it would be chaos. if more people came across the border in many ways the chaos is in the you know immigration system. that is just so incredibly disorganized. it's incredibly backlogged. they can't keep their paperwork straight. and you know the chaos really is so often on the other side. i think chaos and crisis are both just completely misunderstood in terms of immigration. yeah, i think that's right. you know the the fact that we have the people trying to cross the border without the proper documents. that's because we don't have a system that is functioning to allow people to get the proper documents to come and see the united states right? i mean, you know, we can look back to something like the bracero program which had all kinds of flaws in it, but it was at least a guest worker program where people could come to work in the united states when that ended in 1964 and then mexican immigration to the united states was capped in 1965 and went to force in 1968 and the things that we see happening in the border are fundamentally about that right? it's it's the product of the laws that create these categories and the lack of legal way for people to come to the us that produces the the things that we see at the border today. yeah. thank you both for that insightful and thought-provoking conversation about racism in conversation and in discourse with the border. we do have one last question, and i don't know if maybe we would like to like finish up with that because it talks about hope so, let me read it to to both of you right now. it's from hannah shoot a question on a hope with racism being woven into the very fundamental policies on immigration citizenship and with it the politics of quote unquote belonging. is there a possibility for reform or is a radical rethinking and we're doing of these policies necessary. yeah, i think radical rethinking and redoing is the is the answer to that. i mean john mentioned the kind of sweep of the books that i've written and i think that's the thing that comes across in in many of them is making the case that we need to rethink our relationship with movement, you know something that people have done for thousands of years is move from one place to another it's a fundamental characteristic of what humans are is to move and so the idea that we can restrict that that groups of people can draw and imaginary line on a map and then say no one else can cross that line and if you do i'm gonna use violence against you and to me that's the radical thing. that's the thing that we need to question and and call out as fundamentally wrong and the idea of people just wanting to move from one place to another for opportunity for family for work. that is a normal thing and we need to imagine a future world where that is upheld and the violence. words people who make that movement is the thing that is deployed. i'll let you leave it there reese very well put and yeah, i i couldn't agree more i would like to and one last note and that is you really should buy this book. you should buy it because because it's good and because you'll learn something from it and because you it's really essential to support folks who are doing this kind of work i get that that is self-serving because i'm doing something along the lines too, but you know support the bookstore support reese and his scholarship and give it as gifts and and you know, read it and and and think and contemplate on all the wisdom. that's inside it. thanks mine with that. don't forget that you can purchase a white borders at the same. semi co-op bookstore seminary co-op bookstores. so, thank you all for coming. thank you, mr. jones and mr. washington for joining us tonight. and for everybody who was here have a good evening and we'll see you and the