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

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

those who defend immigrants and immigration, mostly metropolitan liberals, often immigrants or children of immigrants themselves, employ

Those current realities and their history underlie the narrative of this book. The first chapter, “Alexander Hamilton,” interrogates the neoliberal celebration of founding father Alexander Hamilton. During the Obama administration, the nation of immigrants chorus actually became a musical, celebrating Hamilton as an immigrant.

The nation of immigrants myth erases the fact that the United States was founded as a settler state from its inception and spent the next hundred years at war against the Native Nations

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 Doctrine of Discovery was engraved in constitutional law by the US Supreme Court under John Marshall in decisions regarding the Cherokee Nation.

With no regular Mexican armed forces to defend Veracruz, Scott’s forces and marines laid siege for twenty days fighting civilian resisters. Scott then proceeded along the main highway in México from Veracruz to the Valley of México facing peasant guerrilla resisters every step of the way, with US victories at Cerro Gordo, Contreras, Churubusco, Molino del Rey, and ending with the seizure and occupation of México City.

Chapultepec Castle was used as a military training school, and in the “battle” a handful of teenaged Mexican cadets—with few weapons and little ammunition—held off the marines, killing most of them over two days of endless fighting in the castle, until the cadets themselves were all dead.

a liberal reform government organized a strong central government, curbing the power of the Roman Catholic Church and guaranteeing universal

Among other reform acts, Júarez suspended payment of all foreign debts, which led to France, under Napoleon III, occupying México for six years. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine, the US pressured the French to leave. In 1877, Porfirio Díaz seized control of México, ruling as a dictator for most of the following thirty-four years until he was overthrown by a massive revolution that began in 1910. Díaz had opened the country to rampant foreign investment, and by 1910, practically all large businesses were owned by mostly US and British nationals and corporations.42

1848 boundary created by war and violence would remain unpoliced by both the Mexican and U.S. governments until decades later because of their lack of capacity to control the area.”43 This was not due to an absence of immigration laws; rather, as George Sanchez writes, “The presence of a strong border culture in which passage had been largely unregulated mitigated against stringent enforcement of these regulations.”44 Most of the population flow at the border was local. Mexicans and Indigenous communities that straddled the border, now separated, found it easy to visit family or friends on the other side, especially as railroads were built in the early 1880s. By 1890, Mexicans were working in the developing Anglo agribusiness industry in the Southwest, as well as in the mines, without being required to hold documentation.

As territorially and treaty-based peoples in North America, they do not fit the grid of multiculturalism but were included by transforming them into an inchoate, oppressed racial group, while oppressed Mexican Americans and colonized Puerto Ricans were dissolved into another such group, variously called “Hispanic”

race and postcolonial theory have failed to address. First, Native presence is erased; second, theories of Atlantic diasporic identities do not take into account the fact that they are settling on Native lands; third, histories of colonization are erased through emphasis on writings on slavery; fourth, decolonization politics are equated with anti-racist politics; and fifth, theories critical of nationalism contribute to ongoing delegitimizing of Indigenous nationhood.

understand and reject settler colonialism and the romanticizing of original white settlers who were instrumentalized to reproduce white supremacy and white nationalism. It’s a call for those who work tirelessly for workers’ rights and working class solidarity to recognize that it’s not only racism that divides the working class but also the effects of settler colonialism. It limits workers’ identification as