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

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

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.”