Friday, February 17, 2017

The Nation of Immigrants Myth

The American Conservative has a history lesson :
“We are a nation of immigrants.” It is every American politician’s incantation, usually prefatory to some shibboleth lauding “strength in our diversity.” The creed of America as nation-of-immigrants (hereafter the “NOI creed”) is now unquestioned by Americans and foreigners alike.


The NOI creed’s assertion of national rootlessness justifies official multiculturalism and mass immigration. American schoolchildren are taught that the Statue of Liberty is a monument to immigration and that e pluribus unum on our currency celebrates the melting pot. Deutsche Bank recently published an analyst’s report, by a Polish immigrant in New York, lamenting a perceived rise in anti-immigration sentiments in the United States and instructing us that here “actually everybody is an immigrant,” so restricting immigration “would be devastating and virtually unthinkable.”


The creed is a half-truth but useful to social engineers transforming this country in ways alien to our history and heritage. Immigrants in the millions have come to the United States, most in waves beginning in the 1840s. Many immigrants and their descendants have contributed mightily to America. Others have contributed to the crime statistics. Some tried America, then went home. Nevertheless, the NOI creed is literally false: Despite thirty-plus years of mass immigration set off by the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, the vast majority of Americans are still American-born children of American-born parents. It is also historically false: Scores of millions of Americans are neither immigrants nor descendants of immigrants.


There's more:
By 1776, British colonists—mostly English, but with strong Scottish, Welsh, and Irish contingents, along with New York’s Dutch colonials and later German arrivals—had created an American branch of British civilization. At the time of the Declaration of Independence, they were long-settled: almost 170 years in Virginia, over 150 in Massachusetts. At great effort—and at the expense of the Indians they uprooted and the African slaves they imported—colonial Americans formed a nation in their own image. The diversity of their settlements reflected the variety of their British origins. David Hackett Fischer’s magisterial Albion’s Seed traces four great British colonial migrations that leave their mark still: Puritans from East Anglia to New England, Cavaliers from the West Country to Virginia, Quakers from the Midlands to the Delaware, and northern Britons, including the Scots-Irish, to the American backcountry.
You'll want to read the entire article.