Vernellia R. Randall, Shutting the Gates: Trump, “Third World Countries,” and the Return of Racial Immigration Control, racism.org (Dec. 2, 2025).

Donald Trump has announced that he intends to “close the border” to what he calls “third world countries.” The phrase is outdated and inaccurate, rooted in Cold War geopolitics, but his use of it is deliberate. The term “third world” has been abandoned for decades by scholars because it reduces diverse nations to a single, racialized category. Today it functions almost entirely as political shorthand for non-white regions, which is precisely why Trump deploys it. In contemporary political speech, “third world” signals a plan to halt migration from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia—regions whose populations are overwhelmingly Black, Brown, and Asian. The proposal is not new. It is a revival of the America that existed before 1965, when immigration law was openly organized around whiteness.

Trump’s public statements blur every legal category—immigration, asylum, refugee admission, visas, family reunification, and work permits—into a single authoritarian impulse: total exclusion. By collapsing asylum, refugee admission, visas, family reunification, and employment migration into a single idea of “closing the border,” Trump erases the legal distinctions that structure the entire immigration system. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), a president can suspend entry of certain groups under §§ 212(f) and 215(a), but no president has the authority to shut down the entire statutory scheme. Even Trump v. Hawaii, which upheld the Muslim Ban, did not endorse a total freeze. It allowed a targeted suspension tied—however thinly—to articulated security criteria. A blanket ban on entire regions of the world, chosen because their populations are non-white, would face immediate constitutional challenges under equal protection and due process principles. Even if the courts ultimately strike it down, the attempt itself normalizes the idea that a president can sort humanity by race and shut the door on entire regions of the world.

To understand the significance of this proposal, we must place it in the long arc of U.S. immigration law. For most of this country’s history, immigration was explicitly racial. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited citizenship to “free white persons.” The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made the United States the first nation in the world to ban a specific ethnic group. Later, the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917 excluded most of Asia and the Pacific, creating one of the earliest and most sweeping race-based immigration bans in U.S. history. African and Afro-Caribbean migration was restricted through colonial law, labor controls, and racialized policing. By 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act built a full racial architecture: a national-origins quota system designed to engineer a white majority indefinitely. Its eugenicists were explicit about their goals—preserving whiteness by excluding most of the world.

The 1930s introduced another chapter of racialized exclusion. During the Great Depression, the government orchestrated mass “repatriation” campaigns that expelled as many as a million people of Mexican descent—including tens of thousands of U.S. citizens—under the guise of economic protectionism. And even in the face of genocide, the United States refused entry to thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, using national-origins quotas to maintain the racial order. These episodes reveal a consistent pattern: when economic or political anxiety rises, the government turns to racial exclusion as the solution.

This pattern persisted into the mid-20th century. The global contradictions of World War II made openly racist immigration policy harder to justify, yet the 1952 INA largely preserved the existing hierarchy. Only during the civil rights era, under the moral pressure following Brown v. Board and global decolonization movements, did Congress finally eliminate national-origins quotas. The 1965 Hart-Celler Act opened pathways for immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, producing the multiracial America we know today—and provoking a white nationalist backlash that continues to shape U.S. politics.

Trump’s promise to shut down immigration from “third world countries” is a direct attempt to undo the 1965 reforms. It is a return to Johnson-Reed logic: whiten the nation by controlling who may enter. And this proposal is not new for Trump. It follows his “shithole countries” remark, the Muslim Ban, the termination of DACA and TPS protections, and family separation—each step reinforcing a worldview that treats non-white migrants as threats to be removed. When he says “third world,” he is not describing economic development. He is talking about race. He is talking about people whose very presence challenges the fantasy of a white, Christian nation.

This push toward racial gatekeeping is not isolated. Across the world—from Hungary to India to parts of Western Europe—right-wing leaders are using immigration law to enforce ethnic nationalism and redefine citizenship as a racial category. Trump’s plan fits squarely within that global pattern.

The impact on immigrant communities would be immediate and devastating. For Black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, migration pathways would evaporate. Students, workers, and families seeking visas would see their applications denied before they were even processed. For Latin American and Caribbean communities, already living under intensified border militarization, a full shutdown would sever family reunification and exacerbate the crises driving migration northward. For Asian communities—long stereotyped as infiltration threats—Trump’s plan would revive the shadows of Chinese Exclusion and the Asiatic Barred Zone, cutting off refugees, students, caregivers, and skilled workers alike.

The fallout would not be confined to individuals. It would destabilize families across borders, entrench racial profiling, justify expanded detention, and normalize the idea that human mobility should be sorted by race. A country that racializes its borders inevitably racializes its internal hierarchy; exclusion at the border reinforces inequality at home. The policy would amplify global inequality and push entire regions into deeper crisis—only to punish their people when they seek refuge. This is not immigration policy; it is demographic control dressed up as national security.

The term “third world” itself does powerful political work. It collapses dozens of cultures, economies, and histories into a single racialized category of undesirability. It marks entire populations as unworthy of entry. It is the language of Cold War hierarchy repurposed for 21st-century racial exclusion.

We are witnessing the re-emergence of a very old pattern. For nearly two centuries, U.S. immigration law was structured to preserve a white demographic majority. That changed only briefly, and only under immense political pressure. Trump’s proposal would drag the country backward into that racial order. It is not merely an immigration debate. It is a fight over whether the United States will once again use law to determine whose humanity counts.

The response must be urgent. Legal challenges will be necessary, but legal resistance alone has never dismantled racial exclusion. The resistance will come from the same communities that have always defended democracy: immigrant-rights organizers, racial-justice advocates, legal defense networks, faith communities, and multiracial coalitions fighting to protect human dignity. Public education and political advocacy are essential. The country has already lived through the era Trump wants to restore. The question now is whether we allow it to return.

Vernellia R. Randall, Professor Emerita of Law, University of Dayton School of Law. This article was drafted with the assistance of ChatGPT, an AI language model. All content has been reviewed and edited by Vernellia Randall to ensure accuracy and coherence.