“The 1619 Project,” published by the New York Times in 2019, posits that slavery is not a dark chapter of American history but rather a fundamental hallmark of our nation’s founding that persists to this day in other forms. Though widely disputed as ahistorical by scholars and historians, the compilation of essays to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of slavery on our shores is now being taught to American students in some schools beginning in middle school.
The basic premise of “The 1619 Project” – that maintenance of white supremacy is part of the DNA of America – extends to how the topic of immigration is now being taught. Since 2024, the University of California at Berkeley has offered a class in its Legal Studies department titled, innocuously enough, “Immigration and Citizenship.”
The course title, however, is where any pretense of objectivity ends. The course description asserts that the goal of the class is to gain an understanding of why “non-white Latinos and Asian Americans[are] so often considered ‘alien citizens,’ while “those of European descent [are] assumed to belong, regardless of their citizenship.” But beyond the alleged ongoing discrimination in immigration policy based on race, ethnicity and national origin, the course instructors add, “We will also examine how these racial concepts are bound up in questions of gender and sexuality.”
Module 1 of the course, Race and the Origins of Modern U.S. Immigration Law, begins with a “comprehensive exploration of critical race theory, using it as a foundational framework to delve into the profound influence of racial categorizations on the development of law.” Viewing U.S. immigration policy through the prism of critical race theory inevitably leads to claims of oppression against certain categories of immigrants.
And indeed, in Module 3, that is exactly where that view leads with the coining of the term “Crimmigration.” In that section of the course, students examine how “race play{s] into who is detained, and how they are treated in detention” and the role of ICE in carrying out these policies. Leaving no doubt about what the takeaway message for the students is, the sole required reading for the lesson pertaining to ICE is a 2018 article published in The Nation, titled “It’s Time to Abolish ICE.”
There is no denying that, at times in our history, immigration policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration Act of 1924 (which introduced the national origins quota system) were overtly discriminatory. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943, while the 1924 law was superseded by the Immigration Act of 1965. It is also true that during the time period that the national origins quota system was in place, overall immigration slowed to a trickle and there were no numerical caps on Western Hemisphere immigration, a region where the majority of people are “non-white Latinos.”
It has been 60 years since the national origins quota system was relegated to the trash bin of history, where it belongs. While many flaws in our current immigration policies must be corrected, the idea that these laws are designed to promote white European immigration is counterfactual. In 1960, the foreign-born population of the United States was about 9.7 million, of whom 84 percent were born in Europe or Canada. Latin America accounted for 10 percent of the immigrant population and Asia, a mere 4 percent. By 2023, as the foreign-born population of the United States approached the 50 million mark, 45 percent of immigrants identified as Hispanic, 27 percent as Asian and 20 percent as white.
In other words, the portrait of U.S. immigration policy being taught at Berkeley is pure disinformation, designed to sow division within our increasingly diverse society. It would
be easy to write off the deliberately inaccurate depiction of U.S. immigration policy in 2025 as Berkeley being Berkeley. But as we have seen, ideologies that originate in elite universities – places where our future leaders are trained – tend to spread insidiously.
Understanding the history of laws and policies that govern one of our most important public policies and learning from the mistakes and successes of the past and present is a valuable academic endeavor. Portraying immigration policy in the 21st century as being rooted in concepts of “racial superiority” is not education; it is propaganda.