America Is Not a Nation of Immigrants

One Lie, Two Untruths and Three Implications

Immigration is the number one issue for the 2024 Presidential election. A nation that cannot or that refuses to secure its borders is not sovereign and will not stay a nation for long. We are keenly aware of the crisis at the southern border of the United States. Some estimate that since Biden took office in January 2021, upwards of 10 million illegal immigrants have crossed the border. Others contest this number. No one knows for sure, but the number reaches into the millions.

Americans have an unusual empathy towards immigrants. This is understandable, since many of them either come from immigrant families or are immigrants themselves; and also because America has a rich tradition of accepting and incorporating immigrants. While at least half of the American populace now seem to have reached a breaking point and support mass deportations, many others are aghast at such a prospect. The recalcitrant defenders of immigration are often under the spell of immigration propaganda. And the core myth of that propaganda is that America is a nation of immigrants. This is the Immigrant Nation Myth.

The Immigrant Nation Myth contains one lie, two untruths, and three implications.

The Lie

Behind the rhetoric of America being a nation of immigrants stands the lie that America as a nation is nothing other than an aggregate of immigrants from around the world—past, present, and future.

Within this lie are two untruths and three unspoken implications.

First Untruth: Are You an Immigrant?

The first untruth is that America is a nation of immigrants because you are an immigrant (speaking to actual immigrants). If you are, in fact, an immigrant, this makes sense and is in many ways comforting. You belong here because you are an immigrant and America is a nation of immigrants. In fact, you might be more authentically American than natural-born citizens.

This untruth is easily dispelled by asking yourself whether you were born in America, or did you immigrate to the country? If you were born here, then you are not an immigrant. Since the vast majority of American citizens were born on American soil, then most Americans are not immigrants. It would be odd to call America a “nation of immigrants” if, however, most Americans are not naturalized immigrants but natural-born citizens.

The fact that most Americans were born in America and that this legally confers upon them citizenship presupposes the idea of “birthright citizenship.” Many legal scholars claim that the 14th Amendment grants the rights of citizenship to anyone (even illegal aliens) born in the United States or to parents who are American citizens: “All persons born … in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States…” This claim is contestable, but resolving it goes beyond the scope of this article. For now, we will grant that all natural-born Americans are citizens. What matters is that they are not immigrants.

Second Untruth: Are Your Ancestors Immigrants?

Having been rebuffed by the indisputable fact that the majority of Americans are not immigrants, the Immigrant Nation advocate pivots to a tried and true retort: it is not the case that most Americans themselves must be immigrants in order for America to be a nation of immigrants; instead, because everyone’s parents, grandparents, great-grandparents or earlier ancestors at some point immigrated to America from another country, this makes everyone an immigrant by proxy—a spiritual immigrant, perhaps.

This argument assumes an unstated principle: as long as one’s ancestors (recent or long ago) immigrated to this country (making you a descendant of immigrants), this is sufficient to make America a nation of immigrants.

Of course, this “principle” is absurd, for when applied consistently to other countries, the results are reductive. Every nation and people group around the world and throughout history have been nations of immigrants. For every country at some point was an uninhabited, uncultivated, and barren piece of land to which migrants had to move and settle, cultivate and develop, and reproduce in order to create a people and then a nation. England is a nation of immigrants, Germany a nation of immigrants, Chile a nation of immigrants, China a nation of immigrants, and so forth. On this standard, every nation is a nation of immigrants, and thus America’s claim to exceptionalism on this basis is nonsense. While it is true that America is essentially like other nations, it is not for this reason.

By this criterion, even the Native Americans are immigrants, for they can trace their ancestors to people groups who migrated to North America from northern Siberia and Asia across a frozen Bering Strait and down through Canada. Thus, Native Americans are not truly native, but immigrants to North America; they are not Native Americans, but Immigrant Americans—just like every other American. This means, among other things, that Native Americans’ claims to original dominion or special treatment are false pretensions.

If there is any true claim of American uniqueness when it comes to immigration and immigrants, it is the following: America created a social and political community with the end of true liberty—spiritual, corporate, political—which was extremely attractive to immigrants suffering under suboptimal conditions elsewhere. In addition, America was such a massive piece of unsettled land that it was both easy to allow many immigrants to settle here early on, and it was also advantageous. In fact, early positive statements about immigration by our founders reflected this exact argument: America is empty and weak and needs industrious people to settle the frontier and contribute to the nation’s manpower and prosperity.

But, contrary to popular narratives today, American attitudes toward immigrants for most of her history has been welcoming, but not incredible. There have been stringent requirements on who qualifies as ideal candidates for immigration, there has been resistance to being inundated by immigrants faster than American society can handle, and there have been moratoriums on immigration that have lasted for decades in order to facilitate the assimilation of those here (as much as possible).

Having exposed the Immigrant Nation lie and its untruths, we must consider the implications that are often drawn from Immigrant Nation rhetoric.

First Implication: American Immigration is American Exceptionalism

The first implication of America being a nation of immigrants is that this makes her unique among the world’s nations. This is the essence of American exceptionalism, and all her other exceptional qualities flow from this fact. The rest of the world’s nations are not nations of immigrants, but have more traditional bonds of blood or kinship and physical geography (“blood and soil”). America, it is boasted, isn’t like this. As the Freedom Conservatism Statement of Principles avows, “America is exceptional because anyone—from any corner of the earth—can seek to live in America and become an American. Nearly all American citizens descend from someone who came here from somewhere else, and we must treat all citizens equally under the law.” America is a novus ordo seclorum, a new and better way of conceiving political life together. America is an open society, a modern nation for a modern and ever-changing world.

In turn, this exceptionalism serves as justification for radical immigration policy that has completely altered the ethnic and demographic face of the nation. Since the mid-1960s, what began as a bipartisan effort to overturn the National Origins Formula that made sensible restrictions on incoming immigrants, has turned into a Democratic de facto open borders policy. If you think America should protect her border and enforce immigration law, you are anti-immigrant and thus anti-American. If you want to build The Wall, then you are a cruel xenophobe and thus anti-American. If, God-forbid, you actually want a re-introduction of quotas to help stabilize ethnic and racial fragmentation and unrest, then you are a racist and a fascist and so very anti-American.

The Democratic left has not only been irresponsible in its immigration policies, but has used the fact of immigration as a weapon (as have the Western elites in Europe). Nations can be conquered, their citizens displaced, and their laws, customs, and religion overturned through migration just as easily, or even more easily, than foreign war or internal collapse. This is a truth as old as human civilization. The Washington elite have encouraged reckless immigration to America for three reasons. First, many of them are themselves or are the children of the cultural revolutionaries of the 1960s, who developed a genuine hatred and anti-Americanism due to their belief that America was an evil nation (because of her colonialism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and so forth). Unrestricted immigration is a tool to terraform and permanently replace who they consider to be primarily responsible for those evils: the white, Christian male of British and Western European descent (e.g., WASPs).

Second, Democrats especially have viewed new waves of immigrants as voter insurance, to shore up their voting base and ensure that the party of minorities, victims, and diversity retains its electoral majorities. Third, on the Republican side, immigrants are continuously talked-up as contributing to American prosperity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. How could America survive economically without immigrants? The untold truth is that poor immigrants (legal or illegal) are indentured servants who provide cheap labor for big multinational and international corporations. Thus, both sides of the regime’s uniparty are invested in allowing ever-greater number of immigrants into the country. Talking points about how America is uniquely a nation of immigrants provides the perfect cover for these policies and helps tamp down any kind of resistance. The consequence is that America is being invaded, its ways of life conquered, and its people displaced.

The Democratic left and even many on the Republican right have developed the Immigrant Nation rhetoric to convince Americans—and if that doesn’t work, intimidate them—into believing that because in our DNA we are a nation of immigrants, our immigration policy must always be open and favorable, compassionate and empathetic, to all immigrants no matter their nation of origin. Any restrictions on immigration or calls for immigration moratoriums are cast as being fundamentally anti-American: these are wicked attempts to strip America of her unique status among the countries of the world and return her to some kind of barbaric blood and soil commitment like other, lesser countries. If this were to happen, America would lose her both her soul and her exceptionalism.

Second Implication: Immigrant America is Cosmopolitan and Global

The second implication of the Immigrant Nation Myth is that if America is a nation of immigrants, then America is essentially cosmopolitan and global. Since all American citizens, supposedly as immigrants of one type or another, have come from all corners of the world, this means the American citizen is a global citizen. Anyone can become an American by simply moving here. America is no longer a “melting pot” requiring immigrants to assimilate to an historically dominant ethnic group, culture, and way of life; instead, America is an international affair and global effort in which immigrants from any country can arrive, claim their spot and a green card, and then re-settle that area in their own original image—preserving their ethnic and cultural distinctions in legally-protected enclaves.

While human migration has been around forever, modern globalization—including revolutions in communications, transportation, and digitization—has radically altered the face of immigration. The mass communication and movement of peoples has never been easier. What facilitates globalization most is urban existence and cosmopolitan lifestyles, since it is primarily in urban spaces where international finance, travel, business, and diplomacy takes place.

Accordingly, the growth of cities and the increasing number of Americans residing there encourages cosmopolitan values, urbane norms, and bourgeois lifestyles that dispose citizens toward uncritically accepting immigrants and mindlessly repeating the Immigrant Nation talking points. Immigrants do not pose a threat to urbanites, because urban-dwellers have no land, culture, or heritage they are trying to preserve. Thus, it is unsurprising why immigrants tend to settle close to cities instead of moving to the countryside to take up agriculture or animal husbandry, or become local artisans or work blue collar trade jobs. (The exception are the immigrant indentured servants who are forced to scrap out a living picking fields and the like.) Urban centers are factories for a global immigrant ethos.

This immigrant ethos leads directly to the third implication.

Third Implication: The Propositional Founding

If America is essentially a nation of immigrants, then America never had an ethnic founding, nor a people group essential to it, nor a geographically or culturally distinctive inheritance. While British and European political, moral, and religious traditions are acknowledged as playing some role in the founding, the scholarly guild is overwhelmingly self-interested in proving that America broke away from all previous traditions and chartered a new path never known in world history. The result is the “proposition nation,” the invention of an ideological nation in which one must merely mouth (or, at best, truly believe and cherish) certain ideas in order to become an authentic American. The proposition nation idea was cemented by Abraham Lincoln, who famously said in his April 1859 letter to Henry L. Pierce,

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

Lincoln was, of course, referring to the Declaration of Independence (drafted by Jefferson, but not authored exclusively by him), which proclaims that “all men are created equal” and are endowed with “certain inalienable rights” such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What Lincoln grasped—which many today do not—is that the founders’ understood the abstract truth of mankind’s equality to apply to only one proposition: that no man has the right to rule another politically as a master would rule his slave. In all other ways, men are unequal, and it is not government’s job to overcome natural inequalities. Lincoln got this much about America right, even if his understanding of America’s founding was in other ways reductive and incomplete.

Yet the popular belief that America is merely a collection of propositions to be collated, written down and debated, and disseminated and taught has taken on a life of its own. No founding father would have believed such a thing, and as proof all one must do is read the first Naturalization Act of 1790 which laid down ethnic and character qualifications, as well as loyalty to constitutional self-government, for citizenship.

The proposition nation idea has two noxious effects. The first is that American has no national identity, nor is America a nation in the traditional sense. She is an “international nation,” an aggregate of disparate individuals and their attachments. Yet nations as aggregates do not exist, for the nation is a “moral person” created by the united wills of the people represented in their leaders. This requires commonalities: a single language, religion, moral duties, and system of laws; shared land and cultivation of it; unspoken customs and norms that make life harmonious and beautiful. From this perspective, an aggregate “nation” of immigrants “united” in shared beliefs over abstract propositions necessarily undermines and will eventually dissolve historic America—first in material ways, then in our collective memory.

The second effect is that American national sovereignty is destroyed. If America is nothing other than a nation of immigrants, she does not have the right to meaningfully restrict, let alone completely cut off, the sole source of her essential identity. According to the Immigrant Nation Myth, America must always accept immigrants, and ideally from all corners of the world. To deny immigrants from one hemisphere, region, nation, language, or religion is an assault upon the very integrity of the Immigrant Nation ideal. Likewise, to demand that immigrants assimilate to a dominant host culture is an attempt to erase the unique immigrant status of the immigrant, when in fact this is what is to be most celebrated. Such a demand can only come from a racist, patriarchal, xenophobic, and colonial mind.

The result is that America is not allowed to police her borders, build a wall, deport illegals, or refuse immigrants from parts of the world inimical to her own history. Nor is she allowed to preserve her own ethnic, cultural, and religious heritage. Unsurprisingly, the nation is transformed into an aggregate and international Economic Zone, in which its political leaders and representatives abdicate their responsibility to rule and instead court international bodies and global leaders. Only a global model of “political” rule is appropriate for immigrant citizens of an international country like America.

Conclusion

With the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life last week, and the outpouring of support he consequently received, Trump has all but locked in a win in November. Trump’s realist immigration policies, his determination to build the wall, his support for deportations, and his plain style and honest talk about both the good and bad of immigration is intolerable to the Left. He must be stopped, and so Immigrant Nation mythology, language, and narratives will only increase in volume and hysteria as we inch closer to the election.

Yet no matter what the regime elites and their lackeys say, America is not a nation of immigrants. She is not hostile to immigrants, and she welcomes those who truly want to become American. Yet what Americanism means is something traditional, particular to our history and heritage, and also beautiful. It is worth fighting to preserve.

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Image Credit: Unsplash

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