The Racial Life of Country of Origin

Abstract This article examines country of origin (COO) as both a legal and symbolic category that embeds racial hierarchies within U.S. immigration law. Although the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished explicit race-based national origin quotas, nationality distinctions continue to operate as racialized codes within U.S. immigration law. Building on theories of racial formation, hierarchy, and triangulation, as well as on settler colonialism and racialized desirability, the article examines how seemingly neutral administrative identifiers become saturated with racial meaning and shape judgments of credibility, merit, and belonging. To evaluate this claim, the authors analyse more than 900,000 employment-based permanent residency applications adjudicated through the Department of Labor’s PERM system between 2015 and 2023. Despite its reputation as a highly structured and technocratic process, PERM outcomes reveal persistent disparities by COO that reflect broader U.S. racial hierarchies. Applicants from regions coded as ‘white’ or ‘honorary white’ consistently enjoy higher approval rates, while those from Latin America, Africa, and other ‘non-white’ origins face significant disadvantages. These disparities become especially pronounced under exclusionary political contexts, most notably during the Trump administration. The findings make three contributions. First, attention is directed from the ‘politics of illegality’ to the ‘politics of legality’. Second, the authors conceptualize COO as a racialized code that translates nationality into racial hierarchy. Third, the article provides the first large-scale empirical evidence that nationality effects persist in employment-based immigration. Together, these contributions highlight how legality can reproduce racial hierarchies within U.S. immigration law.