Not a Nation of Immigrants

Settlers, Immigrants, and America's Complicated Identity: Unraveling the Myth of 'A Nation of Immigrants'

Text exchange with a friend (that inspired this series):

Me: “We’re a settler colonial nation, not a nation of immigrants”

My Friend: “but the usa is both... it began as a colonial settlement but evolved into a nation of immigrants. Both are true. I don't say that to invalidate the wrongs of colonialism but only to state that there is a larger percentage of the population in the usa who are NOT ancestry of the colonial settlers. The Irish, Italians, etc.”

My Friend continues: “So the evils of colonial conquest have been diluted by immigrant populations that followed the settlers.”

“We are a nation of immigrants” is one of the common the justifications, rationalizations, and excuses we settlers make for our colonial past and present - number 3 in Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang’s settler moves to innocence.

What is settler-colonialism?

Settler colonialism is about land. The goal of settler-colonization is the removal and erasure of Indigenous peoples in order to take their land for use by settlers in perpetuity.

In perpetuity means that “settler colonialism is not just a vicious thing of the past, such as the gold rush, but exists as long as settlers are living on appropriated land and thus exists today.” (Laura Hurwitz & Shawn Bourque, Settler Colonialism Primer)

JFK coins the phrase “nation of immigrants”

JFK coined the phrase “we are a nation of immigrants” (and wrote a book with that title) back when he was a Senator, and it’s become a Democrat talking point ever since. Obama famously used it on the campaign trail, as did Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden. It’s the feel-good phrase liberals like to summon up whenever folks on the right start talking about building a wall along the border with Mexico.

Who are these immigrants?

So who were these immigrants? First came the English Puritans, the original colonists, followed by Scots Irish, or Ulster Scots, and then waves of Dutch, French, and Swedish settlers, and then another wave of Irish settlers, followed by waves of Germans and Scandinavians, who settled primarily in the Midwest. Towards the end of the 19th century and early 20th century came Italians, Sicilians, and European Jews.

What do all of these people have in common? They are racialized as white.

Who was Kennedy talking about when he coined the phrase "a nation of immigrants"? His family - Irish Catholics.

Racialization is a social process that may implicate perceptions of physical appearance and also social and cultural attributes, language, religion, and ancestry. Race itself has no biological basis. It is dynamic and unstable. Racism begat race. Racists invented whiteness and continue to define and redefine it, whiteness changing and expanding to include people like the Irish and the Italians, those who were European but not Protestant. The Irish and later the Italians became re-racialized as "white" through processes of assimilation.

To be American was to be white. And maybe still is.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 restricted naturalized citizenship to "free white persons".

Black people were not US citizens - they were neither free nor white - nor immigrants - they had been brought here by force, enslaved.

Native Americans weren't citizens but "merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." That quote is from the Declaration of Independence, one of this nation's founding documents, signed on July 4, 1776.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, granted citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof," but excluded Native Americans because Native American tribes were viewed as "domestic dependent nations," which meant that they were sovereign nations under the protection of, but not subject to the jurisdiction of, the federal government. It wasn't until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 that Indigenous Americans were granted citizenship, although voting rights were withheld in some states until the 1960s.

Chinese laborers played a crucial role in the westward expansion of the United States, building the Transcontinental Railroad. The 14th Amendment didn’t apply to them because the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspended Chinese immigration and declared Chinese immigrants ineligible for naturalization. (Interesting side note: a lot of Chinese laborers, forced out of the United States, traveled south on foot to northern Mexico, where there are significant Chinese Mexican communities today).

Mexicans weren't immigrants. They were already here, living on the land that was surrendered by Mexico to end the Mexican American war, adding what are now the states of Texas,  California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming.

That's a lot of land, and a lot of Mexicans and Indigenous people.

The Mexican American war sparked the US invasion of Mexico in 1846, leading to a two year occupation. The US got as far south as the Mexican capital of Mexico City. It was flat out imperialism, part of the expansion of the US, a massive land grab that enabled the westward expansion via the mythical Manifest Destiny.  

There was talk of annexing all of Mexico, but many politicians were wary of trying to absorb and assimilate so many Brown and Indigenous people. The United States would no longer be majority white, culturally Anglo-Saxon.

The Mexicans living in the newly acquired territory were given a year to choose between Mexican and US citizenship. Because US citizenship was still limited to “free white persons”, those who chose US citizenship became legally white. Socially, they were treated with racism. Lynchings were common. 

"These Mexicans are the meanest looking race of people I ever saw, don't appear more civilized than our Indians generally. Dirty, filthy looking creatures." wrote US Army Captain Lemuel Ford.

People still talk that way today.

Revisionism: Native Americans as the original immigrants

The word "America" has its origins in the name of 16th-century Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. In 1507 a German cartographer created a map of the world that included these newly "discovered" lands across the Atlantic, and in honor of Vespucci he named them "America".

My Mexican American father-in-law scoffs at the word “discovered”. He would tell his children “You don’t discover a place if there are people there to greet you when you arrive!”

A guy I knew in high school is now a California liberal with some money who has retired to Panama. Irritated by returning Indigenous names to certain mountains and parks, like Mt McKinley being renamed Denali in 2015, he comments “Why stop there? I’m in favor of renaming them whatever they were called by the people who were here before the Indians!”

He believes that Native Americans walked across the Bering Straits a few hundred to a thousand years before the Pilgrims arrived, displacing some earlier group. To him, and to many others, Native Americans are just an earlier wave of settlers. His settler beliefs contradict many Indigenous histories that affirm that indigenous people arrived in the Americas first.

This place we call “America” is not “the New World” but an ancient one. Indigenous peoples have been living on this land just about as long as humans have been living in England. Native people are not “First Americans”, and are not the distant, original immigrants.

We are a nation of settlers

“From its beginning, the United States has welcomed—indeed, often solicited, even bribed—immigrants to repopulate conquered territories ‘cleansed’ of their Indigenous inhabitants” writes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

Once arrived on these shores, these immigrants became settlers.  

Tuck and Yang differentiate between settlers and immigrants. “Immigrants are beholden to the Indigenous laws and epistemologies of the lands they migrate to. Settlers become the law, supplanting Indigenous laws and epistemologies. Therefore, settler nations are not immigrant nations.”

The original settler colonists were the English pilgrims - religious fundamentalist separatists making a religious pilgrimage. They would become the upper-class, rich land owners and slave owners. 

They were followed by Scots-Irish who were already seasoned settlers and colonizers, having been recruited by the British to settle Northern Ireland and push the native Irish off their land. This is where scalping has its origins. The Ulster Scots would trade Irish scalps for bounty. They were the front lines in the slaughter of Indigenous peoples, and pushed west into the Ohio Valley and south into West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. (Barack Obama is descended from the Ulster Scots on his mothers side. So was Ronald Reagan).

Trading scalps for bounty

There’s no way around the horror of how the US was made. Native American scalps were traded in by settlers and soldiers for money, because it was too much work to drag an entire corpse into town. “Scalp hunting became a lucrative commercial practice,” writes Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. “Although the government in time raised the bounty for adult male scalps, lowered that for female scalps, and eliminated it for Indigenous children under ten, the age and gender of were not easily distinguished by their scalps nor checked carefully. What is more, the scalp hunter could take the children captive and sell them into slavery.”

We can’t just absolve ourselves by saying we’re a nation of immigrants and make it all go away.

Little house on the prairie

The folks who arrived from Scandinavia and Germany came for the promise of free land. All they needed to do was displace the Indigenous populations. This is why states with Indigenous names like Wisconsin, Nebraska, Dakota, and Minnesota are heavily populated by folks with last names like Anderson, Larsen, Hansen, Johansson, Gustafsson, Petersen, Olsen, Eriksen, Lundeen...

Immigrants don't show up and commit genocide. Settlers do.

Immigrants move to a new country seeking better opportunities, escaping hardships, and other reasons. They do not seek to displace or replace the original inhabitants of the land they move to but rather integrate with them. Settlers, on the other hand, seek to eliminate the inhabitants of the land - Indigenous peoples - and replace them. 

We are not a nation of immigrants because settler colonialism never ended. It exists as long as settlers continue to live on appropriated land. Thus, it exists today. We are settlers. Our forefathers were settlers, quite possibly ones who traded in scalps for bounty.

By equating our experiences / our forefathers' experiences with those of immigrants leads to erasure of the violent and exploitative nature of settler colonialism.

Immigrants don't show up and commit genocide. Settlers do.