Coming to America Pt. 1: History, Myth, and Why Immigration is Crucial to the American Identity.
For a nation of immigrants, Americans have a hard time navigating immigration policy and our history of immigration. Touring past policy helps us understand past immigration realities, how immigration defines the American Identity, and why it still matters for our future.
What is quintessential to the American story? What made America what it is today? Is it the Constitution? Is it an enduring commitment to liberty and democracy? Perhaps it was the adventurous American spirit and ingenuity?
Most would agree that all of these elements are integral to the American story, but the beauty of the American story is that it’s not purely reducible to one component. It’s a complex tapestry of interweaving stories, values, and paradoxes. One strand that is often referenced yet analyzed less is the role of immigration in the American narrative, but American history is inseparable from its immigrants. We are a self-proclaimed “nation of immigrants,” and we pride ourselves on being an egalitarian society where people of all creeds and colors may share in the “American Dream.” However, the questions continually posed throughout America’s short history are “What does that ideal mean on a practical policy level? How have we approached this question in the past? How should we approach it in the future?”
As evidenced by the heated disagreements taking place both on cable TV and around the dinner table, we are a nation far from agreeing about immigration policy and enforcement. These disagreements stem from a tension that immigration policy scholar Michael Lemay asserts has always existed throughout American history. It’s a tension between encouraging immigration to reinvigorate the domestic industry, spur expansion, and enrich the cultural heritage and the goal of also seeking to preserve existing social and economic structures, maintain national security, and retain the perceived American identity.
This tension is further exacerbated by a few misconceptions that are impeding contemporary conversations about immigration.
- America’s widespread narrative divides the history of immigration into two neatly defined eras, a distant past of white European immigration and more recent Hispanic or Asian immigration.[1]
This narrative is fundamentally flawed. As our study of immigration history and policy will demonstrate, the movement of people into and within America has always been more varied and nuanced than this simple narrative allows.
2. There is a perception that the country is receiving a new kind of immigrant that is distinctly different from prior immigrants, so consequently, we face completely new concerns regarding security, assimilation, social values, and economic impact.
This perspective is insufficient for two reasons. One, it discounts the radical heterogeneity in culture, religion, and language of past immigration waves. And two, it draws an extreme differentiation between the shared incentives and experiences of past and present immigrants (i.e., push and pull factors, the impact of national security concerns, and the problems of social tension between natives and immigrants).
3. Many native-born Americans falsely equivocate the immigration system of generations ago to immigration access under the contemporary immigration system.
If you have ever heard or used a line like, “I support immigration, but I want them to do it the right way! Go get in line and go through the process like my ancestors did.” I hope that this series of essays can illuminate that ways in which the proverbial “line” for immigration has changed as a result of policy over decades and has caused immigration access to be far more difficult and complex than previously. The U.S. Department of State infographic above provides a powerful visual of the ballooning wait times for green cards just in the last few decades. The modern American immigration system is a great, gray, sprawling bureaucratic beast with services that span federal agencies and non-governmental non-profits. Many of the issues that immigrants and natives are contending with are not new; historically, we can see that these are recurring concerns or issues. However, it is reductive and/or disingenuous to assert that immigration access, is fundamentally the same as it was even 60–70 years ago. With every executive order, court decision, and passed legislation, we place another tier in the bureaucratic superstructure of the immigration system, a system whose increasing complexity has real impacts on the length of “the line” of people waiting for visas. Recognizing the differences in barriers faced by those seeking to come now versus those seeking to come 100 years ago is important.
The history of immigration in America is a history of tension between competing goals of multiculturalism, growth, and development as opposed to the preservation/protection of existing cultural identity, economic conditions, and enhanced national security. Eras of immigration policy are not defined simply by one element or another. Competing and contradictory forces are often at work, and immigration has always been socially and politically complex. However, as a country, the United States has always continued to grapple with those complexities. My argument in these essays is that struggling through difficult social realities and dealing with policy responses is an ideal worth striving after continually. What makes America a nation of immigrants cannot be reduced to our past; the impact of our history and heritage are reduced to self-fulfilling nostalgia without a commitment to continual and active culture creation.
Immigration in Early America (1770’s ~ 1819):
The American story is intimately entwined with immigration from the beginning, in part, because immigration was a pressing issue in the early colonies. One of the charges levied against King George the III in the Declaration of Independence was that he had “…endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose, obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.” In other words, the Founding Fathers argued that the king was intentionally restricting the flow of immigrants to America, which would have made sense if he was concerned about the sparsely-populated colonies continually siphoning off Britain’s labor force.
Yet, while the colonies’ abundant land and relative religious freedom were appealing to British immigrants, the colonial settlements also benefited from the population growth as the need for labor skyrocketed. A desire for a larger population for future conflicts with European powers and indigenous nations also increased the demand for immigration.[2] Colonial leaders, especially within South Carolina and Georgia, attempted to attract more immigrants by offering tax exemptions, land, naturalization, and other political boons. According to Dr. Robbie Totten, the reason was twofold. First, early colonists saw immigration as contributing to colony security. The larger your population, the better prepared your colony was for conflicts with indigenous people groups or foreign powers like the Spanish, French, and eventually the British. Second, mercantilism, an economic theory propagating that economic growth was achieved through the maximization of exports and minimization of imports, was the preeminent economic perspective of the period. This belief supported the notion that human resources, particularly in a pre-industrial age, were incredibly valuable to generating wealth. You wanted to attract people to your colony whether they were highly skilled or not because the thinking was that more labor generated more wealth.
However, eras of immigration are never monolithic. Despite the population demand for labor and defense, some early American factions had concerns about immigration. In 1798, the Federalist-dominated Congress chose to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts, which increased the residency requirement from 5 years to 14 years to be eligible for citizenship. They also granted the President the power to imprison or deport any non-citizens deemed dangerous. Following a common theme that emerges in the study of immigration history, these acts were passed in response to fear about foreign instability impacting domestic security. The young nation was on the brink of war with France, and there was widespread concern that pro-France immigrants like many of the French and Irish would be dissidents if war broke out.[3]
Mythology surrounding the American national identity is powerful. Many modern Americans retain the impression that this quintessential American identity predated the American revolution and allowed for the establishment of the United States. We rebelled because the colonies had reached a point where our sense of identity and independence as Americans was so distinct from Great Britain that it no longer made sense for us to be colonies of the British Empire, right? Yet, there is little evidence to support this belief. There is more evidence that this lack of a unified national identity was one of the biggest problems for the founding fathers in pushing the revolution forward. In reading many of the founding fathers’ writings, it becomes apparent that they are not appealing to an existing American identity; instead, they are desperately trying to forge one. In the Declaration of Independence, the word “nation” is not mentioned once. It refers only to “free and independent states” because there was no conception of an American nation. At the time, they were only a collection of political units seeking separation from the British empire. The American colonies were a political coalition organized around an expressed goal, not a nation based on shared identity, culture, and narrative. A Virginian would have seen themselves as a Virginian and radically different from a New Yorker or Carolinian. It’s anachronistic to regard this mythical unified American identity as the progenitor of the country.
Undoubtedly, there are now definitive markers of the American identity, but it remains critical to recognize that these traits are mutable. National identity isn’t something that is divinely ordained. As evidenced by the American revolution, countries are not established on the foundation of national identity. The world’s modern history has not been predominated with countries first coalescing around nationalism and setting national boundaries based on that shared identity. Instead, those geographic boundaries are established (often as a result of political realities). The national identity then appears to emerge from the interplay of social, economic, political, and religious forces within the nation’s parameters. Yet, somehow in countries developing these identities, they become entrenched and immutable in the populace’s minds. History can provide hope for the future because it informs us how we have erred, advanced, and wrestled with topics of immigration in the past. American is still a nation of immigrants whose past and future are integrally linked to immigration. We need to be reminded sometimes.
[1] Llosa, A. Global Crossings p.7
[2] Totten, R. National Security and U.S. Immigration Policy, 1776–1790. The Journal of interdisciplinary History Vol. 39, №1. (2008), p. 45
[3] “Alien and Sedition Acts.” Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia, January 1, 2018, 1;
