Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The elephant in the room of immigration is the US military invasion and annexation of half of Mexican territory that spanned more than two decades, 1821 to 1848. During that same period, the eastern half of the United States was being ethnically cleansed with the forced removal of Native nations. White supremacy and settler-colonial violence are permanently embedded in US topography. The United States has a foundational problem of white nationalism that wasn’t new with Nixon or Reagan or Trump. White nationalism was inscribed in the founding of the United States as a European settler-colonial expansionist entity, the economy of which was grounded in the violent theft of land and in racial slavery, and with settlers armed to the teeth throughout its history, presently numbering over three hundred million people with the same number of firearms in civilian hands. Yet only a third of the population own those guns, an average of eight each, and 3 percent of the population own 50 percent of the guns in civilian hands. A great majority of this minority of gun owners are white men who are descendants of the original settlers, or pretend to be.16 These descendants are most obvious in the former Confederate and border states but actually are also scattered in clusters and communities in all parts of the United States. They are the latter-day carriers of the United States’ national origin myth, a matrix of stories that attempts to justify conquest and settlement, transforming the wh...

Stanford law professor and historian Gregory Ablavsky emphasizes the centrality of Indian affairs in creating the Constitution, particularly provisions concerning federalism and the fiscal-military state. He highlights how ratification created a Constitution committed to the violent expropriation of the Indigenous territories bordering the thirteen states. The Constitution created a people empowered to sustain a powerful military to carry out conquest of the continent, with the full participation of the settlers. This was what the war for independence was fought for, with great sacrifices; this is what the Anglo-American settlers desired. For his analysis of the Constitution, Ablavsky borrowed historian Max Edling’s term “fiscal-military state.” Edling took the term from the historical literature on British state formation, in which it refers to “a state primarily designed for war.” Edling writes that the United States did not adopt the British model wholesale, rather the Constitution created a national government that was “light, and inconspicuous,” but which “held the full powers of the ‘fiscal-military state’ in reserve.”33 US historians make much of the fact that the founders did not create a large military, and thereby ignore military history. But the initial importance of the US military was mainly for the gradual taking of the continent, not for engagements with European militaries. The immediate objective of the Washington administration’s policy was to secure the ...

Through the Northwest Ordinance, the United States created a unique land system among colonial powers, including Britain. In the US system, land itself—not just what was produced from the land, such as agriculture, mining, logging, grazing, and so on—was the most important exchange commodity for the accumulation of capital and building the national treasury. In order to comprehend the apparently irrational genocidal policy of the US government toward the presence of Native nations on the land, the centrality of land sales in building the economic base of the US capitalist system must be the frame of reference. This policy was embedded in the design of the fiscal-military state. As Wolfe summed up the issue, “Tribal land was tribally owned—tribes and private property did not mix. Indians were the original communist menace. . . . Whatever settlers may say—and they generally have a lot to say—the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.”4

The history of the United States is a history of settler colonialism. The objective of settler colonialism is to terminate Indigenous peoples as nations and communities with land bases in order to make the land available to European settlers. Extermination and assimilation are the methods used. This is the very definition of genocide. The word and its definition were created by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, published in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.13 Lemkin was Polish, of Jewish descent, and a respected lawyer and prosecutor in Poland until the 1939 German invasion. Although Lemkin escaped to Sweden, forty-nine of his relatives perished in the Holocaust. Lemkin became an advisor to the chief counsel of the Nuremberg trials, during which his concept of genocide as a crime in international law did not yet exist and was not one of the legal bases for the trials. Then, for two years, with the support of the Truman administration, Lemkin lobbied the member states of the new United Nations to adopt the Genocide Convention, which the General Assembly did in the same session as the passage of the Declaration on Human Rights. “Genocide” is a legal term with a precise definition, enshrined in the international treaty the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, presented in 1948 and adopted in 1951. Although President Truman signed the convention, it went into effect in the United States only in 1988 when the US Congress finally ratifi...

After the Civil War, six of the seven divisions of the US Army were stationed west of the Mississippi, where they carried out genocidal wars against the Plains and southwestern Indigenous nations, including the intentional extermination of tens of millions of bison. These troops were pulled out of the South, where they were supposed to be occupying the defeated former Confederate states to allow for land distribution to former slaves and for their political participation in democratic elections. Without sufficient US Army troops to stop them, the Ku Klux Klan made Reconstruction impossible, imposed a reign of terror, and restored the ex-Confederate elite. But the “wild west” originated in the Northwest Territory, east of the Mississippi, not in the West. Defining the West as the site of genocidal conquest erases its origins at the very founding of the United States, when and where its leaders were intent on building world power based on land theft, genocide, and slavery, the pillars of the US fiscal-military state.

Cooper conjured the birth of something new and wondrous, literally, the US American race, a new people born of the merger of the best of both worlds, the Native and the European, not a biological merger but something more ephemeral involving the disappearance of the Indian. Cooper has Chingachgook, the last of the “noble” and “pure” Natives, die off as nature would have it, handing the continent over to Hawkeye, the indigenized settler and Chingachgook’s adopted son. The publication arc of the Leatherstocking Tales parallels the Jackson presidency. For those who consumed the books in that period and throughout the nineteenth century—generations of young white men mainly—the novels became perceived fact, not fiction, and the basis for the coalescence of US American settler nationalism, the settler ideology that justified the fiscal-military state.

In 1978, scholarly articles were published in the book Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case, which remains a fundamental text in Appalachian studies.47 Pearson writes that in the flagship essay of the collection, written by Helen Lewis and Edward Knipe, the authors refer to the white residents as “the indigenous population,” while those of the residents who align themselves with the coal companies are designated as “natives who become colonizers of their own people.” They write of the “colonizers” manifesting racism against an Indigenous population, referring to the white settler population, which the authors refer to as “the colonized.” The authors analogize regional development organizations to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, claiming that the white population lives “on the Appalachian Reservation.” Pearson notes that this is a comparison also made by other white Appalachian scholars. Most disturbing is that Lewis and Knipe treat the original invasion of the Scots Irish squatters as peaceful settlement rather than genocidal violence. They portray an empty landscape that the settlers occupied, the Indigenous peoples somehow having disappeared with white settlers inheriting indigeneity and the land.48 In another anthology, Edward Guinan writes of the Appalachian region, “whose indigenous Cherokee integrated, educated, and nursed the exiled Celtic arrivals into maturity, wisdom, and community.”49 Julie “Judy” Bonds, a well-known activist opposing mountaintop re...

Criticizing US scholars for their erasure of the Indian, Mahmood Mamdani writes: Engaging with the native question would require questioning the ethics and the politics of the very constitution of the United States of America. It would require rethinking and reconsidering the very political project called the U.S.A. Indeed, it would call into question the self-proclaimed anticolonial identity of the U.S. Highlighting the colonial nature of the American political project would require a paradigmatic shift in the understanding of America, one necessary to think through both America’s place in the world and the task of political reform for future generations.72 Furthermore, Mamdani argues, regarding the conflation of immigration and settlement: immigrants join existing polities whereas settlers create new ones. “If Europeans in the United States were immigrants, they would have joined the existing societies in the New World. Instead they destroyed those societies and built a new one that was reinforced by later waves of settlement.” The nation of immigrants rhetoric that avoids the dynamics of settler colonialism plays a role that “is essential to settler-colonial nation-state projects such as the United States and Israel. The political project of the settler—to create and fortify the colonial nation-state—becomes obscured by the nonpolitical project of the immigrant, who merely seeks to take advantage of what the state allows every citizen.”73 Historian Lorenzo Veracini also...

Horses played a central role in pursuing runaways. Horses were a symbol of power for slavers, not only for show and racing but also as a physical symbol of racial power. Johnson writes, “The words ‘slave patrol’ summon to mind a vision of white men on horseback, an association so definitive that it elides the remarkable fact that the geographic pattern of county governance in the South emerged out of circuits ridden by eighteenth-century slave patrols.”34 It was not only the advantage of height and speed that a horse provided in pursuing a person on the run, but also the nature of the animal itself, its own power, the fear the huge, galloping animal could evoke, and the severe bodily harm it inflicted when it trampled a person or when the patroller tethered a bound captive to the horse.

By the time of the famine that began in 1845, impoverished and colonized Ireland had already been bleeding its population through emigration, mostly to the United States. By the 1830s, Irish Catholics outnumbered Scots Irish Protestants in the United States. By 1840, Irish Catholic immigrants constituted a third of the immigrant population, which increased to half the immigrant population with the arrival of the famine refugees after 1845. Many well-off Irish Catholics as well as Scots Irish Protestants immigrated to the United States both before and after US independence, but poverty was the rule for the famine refugees, and anti-Catholicism in the United States was virulent. Irish American historian Patrick Higgins points out that early on in their North American and Caribbean colonies, the British exported colonized Irish as a surplus population, creating a kind of “pressure valve.”15 As Cecil B. Rhodes famously said in the late nineteenth century, I was in the East End of London (a working-class quarter) yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for ‘bread! bread!’ and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism. . . . My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus ...

In the lead-up to the formation of the United States, Protestantism in the form of Puritanism refined already-existing European white supremacy as part of a political-religious ideology in defense of settler-colonial genocide of Indigenous inhabitants and the codification of Blackness as slave status. Irish famine immigrants, then, arrived in the United States as inferiorized and stigmatized people. This was the time of the violent ethnic cleansing of the Southeast Indigenous commons in the 1840s and appropriation of land and human property by slavers. The result was the Cotton Kingdom, a vast commercial-agricultural construct made up of factory-like plantations surrounded by concentration camp conditions to control enslaved Black workers, elevating the US economy to the wealthiest among European states. This was the birth of fully developed racial capitalism, the fiscal-military state. Despite their lowly state, the Irish refugees, because the majority were light-skinned in a US culture obsessed with whiteness, became US Americans inheriting the privileges of white settler. The stigma of Catholicism was resolved through settler-colonial extreme patriotism, which they came to embrace.28 A major factor in Irish acceptance of US patriotism was Irish republicanism, as they saw the United States as a prior colony of Britain that revolted and became a republic, not recognizing the settler colonialism in the US that was patterned after the English settler colonialism in Ireland....

Historian Livia Gershon observes that “to a large extent, northern US cities invented their police departments as a way to control the ‘Irish problem.’“ Irish immigrants populated shantytowns and slums of cities, and many, for lack of employment or income, turned to petty theft and sex work. Drunkenness, domestic abuse, and gangs were the fruit of impoverishment. There were many poor Irish Americans in the cities even before the influx of millions of famine refugees. In 1837 in Boston, there was a Protestant-led, anti-Irish Catholic riot of fifteen thousand people, which was about a fifth of Boston’s population, that destroyed the Irish neighborhood. Only the Irish Americans were prosecuted while the assailants went free. The next year the Boston Police Department, the first in the country, was established to control the “dangerous classes.” Unsurprisingly, nativist panic flourished with the arrival of masses of Irish refugees in the 1840s and ‘50s. One Boston Irishman was hired by the police force in 1851, but was ousted after three years when the nativist and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party took control of the Massachusetts legislature. Hiring predominately Irish Americans for the police force was a result of Irish political power through the Democratic Party in cities over the next decades.49 Organized police departments were established in New York City in 1845; Albany, New York, and Chicago in 1851; New Orleans and Cincinnati in 1853; Philadelphia in 1855; and Newark...

Union workers in most countries are considered a progressive if not left-wing force. But the US working class is different. Mike Davis offers three main reasons. First, by the mid-nineteenth century, workers’ geographic mobility in the United States substituted for collective action; that is, if working conditions or poor pay created intolerable conditions, the worker could move on. British settler colonialism was based on attracting settlers to gain free land, property; so, as Friedrich Engels observed, US culture was the “purest bourgeois culture.”58 Second, Davis cites the cultural division of the US working class, writing that the most disastrous obstacle to labor unity in the 1850s was the reaction of native workers to the arrival of several million impoverished Irish migrants. They provided cheap labor for the growth of New England factories as well as armies of raw muscle for western railroads and the Pennsylvania coalfields. They were met by universal nativist hostility and riots against them, evicted from workplaces, refused admission into trade unions, and excluded from voting. Protestantism in the United States was not simply a majority religion but a constituent militant element of US nationalism.59 The millions of Irish Catholic famine refugees arrived in the aftermath of the half century of Protestant fervor after the second “Great Awakening,” the first having swept through the British colonies in the 1730s and linked the separate settler colonies by fanatic ...

Mamdani’s argument that the nation-state was born in 1492 is validated by the conscious mythical founding of the United States as a white republic that like the establishment of the Spanish nation-state was founded on white supremacy and ethnic cleansing. Required courses in history were incorporated into US school curricula in the early nineteenth century introducing children and young people to Columbus practically as an ancestor. But clearly Columbus took on a renewed significance and purpose with the increasing presence of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States with the arrival of millions of Irish immigrants and the millions of Eastern and Southern European immigrants, many of them Catholic, particularly the four million Italians who arrived between 1890 and 1920. Trouillot writes that “ethnicity gave Columbus a lobby, a prerequisite to public success in U.S. culture.” In 1866, there were fewer than four thousand Italian Americans and only a few Spaniards in the United States, yet they already celebrated October 12 as Columbus Day in New York, and commemorations subsequently spread to Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and San Francisco. But the real boost for Columbus came from another source: Irish Americans and the Roman Catholic Church, with the 1882 establishment of the Knights of Columbus.11

The site of the fair in South Chicago was nicknamed the “White City” for the massive and glistening white fake-marble buildings constructed specifically for the fair, not meant to be permanent, but rather templates for how a future city should appear, grandiose and imposing, as well as symbolizing the triumph of capitalism. On the carnivalesque midway of the White City was the Ferris wheel, which was invented for the occasion. Not far away, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his thesis, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” to the American Historical Association, which had convened its annual meeting at the exposition. Nearby, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West performed.19 Without mentioning the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, Turner chose the year 1890 as the demarcation of the end of the frontier, warning that the seemingly endless moving frontier of white settlement that had formed US wealth, character, and culture had closed, and the future was not clear without the frontier escape valve for the teeming landless masses. Buffalo Bill had the answer: fantasy, reenactment, premiering the soon-to-be-born western movies. Self-identified Christian socialist and ordained Baptist minister Francis Bellamy wrote a pledge of allegiance to the US flag in 1892, which was a presidential election year in addition to being the quadricentenary of Columbus. Both presidential candidates, Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland, urged the use of the new pledge as a way o...

The oppressed masses of Italian immigrants would find the attachment to Columbus an avenue to acceptance. They realized that the accepted representation of Columbus as “first founder” of the United States served to connect being Catholic and being Italian with the very birth of the United States; therefore, Italian immigrants could present themselves as Italian descendants of the original Italian founder, not so much as immigrants but returnees, as part of the origin story of the United States. Historian Danielle Battisti shows how casting Columbus as “the first immigrant” rewrote history, even though he never set foot on the continental landmass that became the United States and was never an immigrant himself, and even though the English colonies that became the United States did not exist in 1492. Later, in 1965, when Italian Americans campaigned to overturn immigration exclusion restrictions, they employed the origin story based on Columbus to great effect.27 Matthew Frye Jacobson observes that “race is absolutely central to the history of European immigration and settlement.” That centrality was based in the founding 1790 naturalization law—An Act to Establish a Uniform Rule of Naturalization—that “white persons” were allowed to immigrate and become citizens. “The Europeanness—that is to say, whiteness—was among the most important possessions one could lay claim to. It was their whiteness, not any kind of New World magnanimity, that opened the Golden Door.”

Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European immigrants to the United States were in search of jobs. Many German immigrants were socialists fleeing political persecution, and Jewish immigrants were fleeing violent pogroms in Eastern Europe, but they all had to find work. At the turn of the twentieth century, nearly 60 percent of the US industrial workforce was foreign born, most being the nine million immigrants from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, as well as those continuing to emigrate from Ireland. Unlike the British, Irish, and German early settlers in the colonies or early United States, immigrants to the Industrial Revolution—mostly rural Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Jewish, Czech, Slovak, Serb, Greek—lacked skills suited for industry. For instance, in 1907, of the fourteen thousand common laborers at the US steel mills in Pittsburgh, nearly twelve thousand were Eastern Europeans. They worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, at low pay and made up the lower and poorly paid ranks of the urban sweatshops and the mills, factories, and mines. Except for the Jewish immigrants who had fled Jew-hating, violent pogroms in Russia and Poland, many of the immigrants had hopes of returning home. None had the mythical American Dream in mind. In 1908, more Austro-Hungarians and Italians left the US than arrived. Those immigrants working in the large cities were packed into crowded slums, making up nearly 60 percent of the population of cities with more than a hu...

The main reason that capitalist giants like Henry Ford maligned Jews had less to do with banking than with the fact of their labor militancy. This was the time of the rise of the US Socialist Party and militant trade unionism, as well as the Bolshevik Revolution. By 1915, there were one and a half million Jewish residents in New York City, around 30 percent of the population. The clothing industry employed around a quarter million Jews and some Italians. The pay was by piece produced rather than by the hour, and with sixty- to seventy-hour workweeks in poorly ventilated, dirty, badly lighted work spaces, the work regimen was grueling. Most of the unskilled labor was done by young, single women. Twenty thousand of the young women went on strike in 1909, only to be brutalized and arrested on the picket line and replaced by others. The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union had formed in 1900 and gained some contracts after the strike.43 Writer and poet Emma Lazarus, best known for her poem with the lines “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” inscribed posthumously in 1903 at the base of the Statue of Liberty, was born in 1849 to a wealthy industrialist father of Sephardic Jewish heritage and a mother of Ashkenazi roots. She took up the cause of the masses of Jews fleeing persecution in the 1870s. During her short life—she died in 1887 at thirty-eight—Lazarus studied Hebrew and Jewish history, established the Hebrew Technical In...

Roosevelt was an early convert to “social Darwinism,” which led to the racist pseudoscience of eugenics. In his view, all the darker peoples were inferior, particularly Native Americans, who were destined to disappear completely. But he also regarded poor whites as inferior and distinguished himself from those “game butchers” who hunt and kill animals for profit or food. He identified with James Fenimore Cooper’s character Hawkeye and embraced the Boone myth, as men killed animals or other humans only to test and prove their manhood. Roosevelt’s hunting was for aristocrats, to revitalize the superior class of the species. Furthermore, he theorized that a new race was born with testing of settlers’ survival skills in nature, creating a new kind of aristocracy destined to rule the world. The settler “stock” that morphed into that superior species, Roosevelt asserted, was composed of Anglo-Saxons, Scots Irish, French Huguenots, and German and Dutch Protestants.52 However lowly and savage on Roosevelt’s scale, Native peoples played a key role in his theory of the genesis of US-settler white supremacy. He theorized that the superior European American was strengthened by not intermarrying with their defeated enemies, the Indians, which would have caused loss of vigor. Slotkin summarizes the genocidal violence inherent in the perspective: “American settlers must regain that vigor by repelling and exterminating their barbarians. Instead of biological exchange with savages of anoth...

Proponents of eugenics argued that the genetic makeup of a person and that person’s station in society were interrelated; that is, if a person was poor, it meant they were genetically defective. Their Puritan Calvinist forefathers had embraced the notion of the “elect,” who were predestined to join the Christian God in heaven, those whose worldly wealth and success reflected their destined status. In US culture, with its deep racial coding from its founding, race and eugenic theory were inseparable, although, as Theodore Roosevelt argued, poor whites were included as genetically inferior.57 Roosevelt advocated sexual sterilization of criminalized individuals and those with cognitive differences from the norm, alleging that otherwise the United States would be committing “race suicide.” Roosevelt-appointed Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld compulsory sexual sterilization laws, which gave the state of Virginia, thereby all states, the power to regulate the breeding of its citizens.58 A few years after the Supreme Court decision, the Nazi regime that took power in Germany in 1933 adopted US race law and eugenics as a fundamental platform for their governance, as well as embracing US continental imperialism and ethnic cleansing as the basis for their program of Lebensraum, which led to death camps for Jews, Roma, communists, and the disabled.59

The Nazis’ adoption of the US pseudoscience of eugenics has been well documented. They borrowed US race laws and also the US strategy of continental imperialism, ethnically cleansing the land in order to populate it with white settlers, what the Nazis called Lebensraum. Less well known is Nazi officials’ interest in US racially determined immigration laws and citizenship requirements. Writing four years after the 1924 immigration act, Adolf Hitler, in the unpublished 1928 sequel to Mein Kampf, admiringly characterized the United States as “a race-state,” referring to the US racist immigration measures that began with Chinese exclusion in 1882 and expanded to other nationalities in 1924. Hitler wrote, “American immigration policies provide confirmation that the previous ‘melting pot’ approach presupposes humans of a certain similar racial basis,” and that approach “immediately fails as soon as fundamentally different types of humans are involved.” When the Nazi lawyers began studying US race laws in depth in 1936, they were surprised that racial exclusion dated to the founding, one remarking that such was not common at the time.45 Yale law professor James Q. Whitman writes in his important book Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, “The two new Nazi anti-Jewish measures that we remember today as the Nuremberg Laws . . . were the product of many months of Nazi discussion and debate that included regular, studious, and often admiring enga...

Viet Thanh Nguyen, who immigrated as a child with his Vietnam War refugee family, writes, “When we remember the wars that forced people to flee, oftentimes into the embrace of their colonizer or invader, then we can see that the immigrant story, a staple of American culture, must actually be understood, in many cases, as a war story.”129 Indeed, as of 2020, the US had been at war against Asian peoples for 122 years, killing millions of civilians and creating internal and migrating refugees and immigrants, many to the United States. The US Asian wars began with the invasion and occupation of the Philippines, 1898–1944. Since 1969, ten years after Philippine independence, the United States military has been involved in counter-insurgency in the Philippines against groups resistant to continued US domination, and with the post-9/11 “War on Terror,” against the Muslim community. Robert Kaplan writes of the strategic importance of the Philippines for the United States, in terms of what he deems the real enemy, China: “Combatting Islamic terrorism in this region carried a secondary benefit for the United States: it positioned the U.S. for the future containment of nearby China.”130 The war with Japan, 1941–1945, ended with the United States’ use of its newly invented nuclear and hydrogen bombs, which killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, inaugurating the permanent threat of nuclear war and ramping up the military industrial complex. In a...