UC Berkeley Hosts Free Public Lecture on Nov. 5: UCLA Historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez on Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control
The University of California, Berkeley, in the city of Berkeley, Alameda County, California, will host a free public lecture on Thursday, November 5, 2026, at 4:00 p.m. in Banatao Auditorium, Sutardja Dai Hall, on the UC Berkeley campus. UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez will deliver the Hitchcock Grant Lecture, titled "Racist By Design – Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control." The talk is part of the Berkeley Graduate Lectures, a group of eight endowed lectureships that have brought distinguished visitors to Berkeley since 1904. All Berkeley Graduate Lectures are open to the public and admission is free; no tickets are required. Recordings of the lectures are also made available online and on UCTV.
In this lecture, Hernandez traces two centuries of U.S. immigration control — from the earliest federal restrictions through the creation of the Border Patrol to the modern detention and deportation system — and examines how the system was designed and whom it was designed to control. Her research is well known for recovering the human stories inside enforcement archives: her book "Migra!: A History of the U.S. Border Patrol" (2010) reconstructed the Patrol's origins in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and "City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965" (2017) traced Los Angeles's long history of incarceration. The November 5 lecture draws this work together into a single account of how immigration control became a central institution of American governance.
Kelly Lytle Hernandez holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also directs the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies' Million Dollar Hoods research project. In 2019 she received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, widely known as the "genius grant," for her work revealing the history of the U.S. immigration enforcement and carceral systems. No registration is needed for the Berkeley lecture; attendees may simply come to Banatao Auditorium before the 4 p.m. start.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：旧金山湾天使岛移民站（Angel Island Immigration Station）旧址。1910至1940年间，大批移民在此被审查与羁候审，许多华人移民因排华法案在此被长期拘留，天使岛因此成为美国移民管控史的重要现场。CC BY-SA 4.0，摄影：E. Bailey，来源：Wikimedia Commons。Photo: The former U.S. Immigration Station on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, where from 1910 to 1940 many immigrants — including large numbers of Chinese detained under the exclusion laws — were inspected and held. CC BY-SA 4.0, by E. Bailey, via Wikimedia Commons.
