Sacred Borders, Divine Hierarchies offers a religious and discursive history of the modern American immigration state. Rather than treating the rise of federal immigration restriction in the United States at the turn of 20th century as a story primarily of labor conflict, racial nativism, legal development, or bureaucratic expansion, the book asks how exclusion became morally intelligible and emotionally durable. It argues that liberal Protestantism—the culturally dominant religious formation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—did not merely comment on immigration politics from the outside. It helped build the moral, institutional, and affective infrastructure through which Asian exclusion became thinkable, administrable, and defensible as an act of national stewardship rather than coercion.

The book traces this religious and cultural architecture of exclusion from the Page Act of 1875 to the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. Moving across China, India, California, Boston, Washington, D.C., and the broader Pacific world, it follows missionaries, reformers, rescue-home workers, denominational leaders, social scientists, restrictionist organizations, immigration officials, and Asian/American Christian critics. I show how Protestant institutions helped create practices of surveillance, certification, rescue, and classification that the federal state later absorbed and formalized. I also show how missionary writing, sermons, philanthropic surveys, and reform literature produced a body of “moral knowledge” about Asian sexuality, character, domesticity, religion, and assimilability—knowledge that gradually hardened into the evidentiary grammar of admission and exclusion.

At the center of the book is what I call the progressive-exclusionary paradox: the fact that some of the most reform-minded, internationally engaged, and theologically sophisticated Protestants—not only crude nativists or reactionary exclusionists—supplied Asian exclusion with its most durable moral legitimacy. The same liberal Protestant commitments that animated missions, abolitionist memory, the Social Gospel, women’s protection work, and social reform also helped translate hierarchy into duty, exclusion into care, and racial restriction into Christian responsibility. The book therefore challenges the familiar binary in which religious and/or cultural progressives appear as natural allies of immigrants and religious conservatives as the primary agents of xenophobia. It shows instead that liberal Christianity itself was deeply implicated in the making of the exclusionary state.

Sacred Borders, Divine Hierarchies also repositions Asian exclusion within the broader history of American religion and immigration. Rather than treating anti-Asian restriction as a regional western episode or an ethnic exception to the main story of immigration history, the book argues that debates over Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and South Asian mobility were central sites where the United States learned to moralize border control. In these debates, questions of race, religion, labor, sexuality, empire, and state power converged with unusual force. Asian exclusion became one of the key arenas in which Americans defined who could be civilized, who could be Christianized, who could be assimilated, and who could belong.

The book also recovers Asian and Asian American Protestant voices who challenged this architecture from within. Chinese and Japanese Christian leaders, missionaries, students, journalists, and reformers mobilized the language of scripture, Christian universalism, and American ideals to expose the contradictions of a nation that preached liberty, justice, equality, and salvation abroad while building racial barriers at home. Their critiques reveal that Protestant discourse was never a single chorus of exclusion. It was also a contested arena in which Asian/American Christians demanded recognition not as objects of rescue or conversion, but as fellow believers, moral interpreters, and critics of Christian America.

Ultimately, Sacred Borders, Divine Hierarchies argues that U.S. immigration policy has never simply been a bureaucratic or legislative mechanism. Rather, immigration control is profoundly moral and cultural, continually defined and redefined through contested religious imaginaries, racial anxieties, and cultural narratives. By historicizing these moral struggles, my dissertation provides crucial insight into why America’s borders remain morally charged, culturally fraught, and perpetually re-contested through struggles over race, religion, and belonging.

*The book is based on my dissertation (Harvard University, 2026), advised by Catherine Brekus (chair), David F. Holland, and Erika Lee.