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

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

“A nation of immigrants” was a mid-twentieth-century revisionist origin story.

In 1958, then US senator John F. Kennedy, surely informed by liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., published the influential and best-selling book A Nation of Immigrants, which advanced the notion that the United States should be understood or defined through the diversity of the immigrants it had welcomed since independence.13 This thesis was embraced by US historians and found its way into textbooks and school curriculums. It is neither coincidental nor surprising that Kennedy would introduce this idea as, at the time, he was strategizing how to become the first president born of immigrants—albeit very wealthy ones—and the first Catholic president in a Protestant-dominated culture.

“Operation Wetback” began in 1954 to round up and deport more than a million Mexican migrant workers, mainly in California and Texas, in the process subjecting millions—many who were actually US citizens—to illegal search and detention and deportation, forcing them to forfeit their property. Workers were deported by air and trains and ships far from the border, leaving those who were US citizens stranded and without the documents enabling them to return to their homes in the United States. “Operation Wetback” was a repeat of the Hoover administration’s deportation of a million Mexicans in the 1930s, dubbed “Mexican Repatriation.”

This is the bogus speculation of US white nationalists who claim that those imagined original aborigines were in fact European, possibly Irish. A few pages on in the text, in the only other mention of Native Americans, Kennedy refers to them as “the first immigrants,” while dismissing their presence as “members of scattered tribes.”

Equally unsettling, Kennedy includes enslaved Africans as immigrants, although the book contains the infamous drawing of a slave ship, with humans chained down on their backs, scarcely an inch between each, packed like sardines. It is striking to read how profoundly Kennedy whitewashed history by noting that “the immigration experience was not always pleasant”

This idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants was hatched in the late 1950s, and while Kennedy was its ambassador, it came to reflect the US ruling-class response to the challenges of the post-World War II anticolonial national liberation movements, as well as civil and human rights social movements domestically.

White Citizens’ Councils organized all over the United States, linking racial integration with communism and labeling it un-American.

And, significantly, the relatively benign, century-old National Rifle Association was taken over by the Second Amendment Foundation, a white nationalist organization that had been founded in 1974 by Harlon Carter, who had been the border chief of the 1950s mass deportation of Mexicans in “Operation Wetback.” This is the moment when the Second Amendment became a white nationalist cause, relying on the right-wing ideology of originalism—that is, interpreting the original meaning of the US Constitution.

Anticommunism was the connective tissue among these organizations until the socialist bloc collapsed in 1990, although anticommunism remained a social and political weapon of control domestically and internationally.

In the mid- and late 1960s and early 1970s, while the US war in Vietnam raged, the then liberal United States ruling class and its brain trust sought ways of responding to social demands while maintaining economic, political, and military domination. They settled on multiculturalism, diversity, affirmative action, and yes, the nation of immigrants ideology in response to demands for decolonization, justice, reparations, social equality, public spending on social welfare, and an end to US imperialism, counterinsurgency, and overthrow of governments.

Tellingly, the first federal immigration law, which created the foundation for US immigration, was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. It is crucial to recognize that when and how “immigration” as such began, it was based on overt, blatant racism and a policy of exclusion, and it has never lost that taint.

Yet, those who defend immigrants and immigration, mostly metropolitan liberals, often immigrants or children of immigrants themselves, employ the idea of a nation of immigrants naively without acknowledging the settler-colonial history of the United States and the white nationalist ideology it reproduces.

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.

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 white frontier settler into an “indigenous people,” believing that they are the true natives of the continent, much as the South African Boers regarded themselves as the “true” children of Israel, powered by Calvinism; the Calvinist Scots settlers did in Ulster, Ireland; or Jewish settlers in Palestine—all established by an imaginary God-given covenant making them the chosen peoples.

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 in conquering the continent.

Even before independence, mostly Scots Irish settlers had seized Indigenous farmlands and hunting grounds in the Appalachians and are revered historically as first settlers and rebels, who in the mid-twentieth century began claiming indigeneity. Self-indigenizing by various groups of settlers is a recurrent theme in the chapters that follow.

The fact that a third of the continental territory of the United States today was brutally annexed through a war of conquest is inscribed on that international border. The cold war against México has never ended, and the border is an open wound. There is a history of US aggression against México and Mexicans, militarily and economically as well as ideologically, from Walt Whitman to Patrick Buchanan and Donald Trump.

Historian Nancy Isenberg observes that Miranda’s revision of the founding era and characterization of Hamilton has more to do with current politics than history, making Hamilton a symbol for the Obama era.

The anti-immigrant policy of Hamilton’s Federalist Party is absent from the script, allowing Hamilton to be the immigrant-made-good who was an advocate of immigrants. Isenberg notes that “a more accurate musical about the immigrant experience would be named Gallatin [for the politician Albert Gallatin]. Here is the story of a Swiss émigré mocked for his French accent and hounded by the Federalists who, with him in mind, crafted a constitutional amendment that aimed to deny immigrants the right to hold public office.”

But Hamilton did not sympathize with immigrants or any kind of underdog. Hamilton took a hard line on the presence of foreigners and naturalization of citizenship.

Even as early as 1954, historian James Morton Smith criticized Hamilton biographers for insisting on Hamilton’s liberalism, particularly regarding immigration, thereby absolving him from any involvement in invoking the draconian Alien and Sedition laws.

Hamilton not only opposed liberal immigration, he also supported a forceful expulsion policy.

His sole remedy for the cruelty of the bill was protection for foreign merchants and for the few aliens whose demeanor had been “unexceptionable.” Hamilton apparently thought that it would be neither cruel nor violent to uproot the mass of peaceable aliens in the United States and deport them.

Nancy Isenberg, author of Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr, takes exception to Miranda’s portrayal of Aaron Burr in the musical as an envious and power-hungry man without a moral compass and who is obsessed with diminishing Hamilton, leading to the duel and Hamilton’s death. In reality, Burr was the opposite. Devoted to the values of the Enlightenment, he advocated criminal justice reform, press freedom, and the rights of women and immigrants. The Federalists accused Burr of “revolutionizing the state,” because as a member of the New York State Legislature, he backed funding for internal improvements of roads and bridges and for debtor relief, and establishing a more democratic method of electing state senators. And significantly, given the musical’s characterization of Hamilton as pro-immigrant, it was actually Burr who, among the politicians, was uniquely friendly to immigrants.

Reed effectively challenges the characterization of Hamilton as an abolitionist, noting that when the successful 1791 slave revolt in Haiti occurred, Hamilton sided with the French slaveholders, not the self-emancipated slaves.15 Reed also condemns Miranda for casting Black and Latino actors for the roles of Hamilton and the other “founding fathers,” most of them slavers, yet having no actual enslaved Africans appear in the musical.

In the fall of 2020, a researcher at the Schuyler Mansion found evidence that had long been overlooked in letters and Hamilton’s own account books indicating that he not only bought and sold slaves but also personally owned slaves.

History is entirely created by the person who tells the story.”

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.

The Militia Act of 1792, the forerunner of the Insurrection Act of 1807, mandated a genocidal policy against the Indigenous nations of the Northwest Territory, allowing for federal troops to eliminate the resistant communities in order to allow settlers to occupy the land.

The drive of colonial settlers to expand over the mountain range to appropriate this territory was a primary motivation for independence from Britain. With the establishment of the United States, the first structure of settler colonialism was erected.

The founders were not an oppressed, colonized people. They were British citizens being restrained by the monarch from expanding the thirteen colonies to enrich themselves. They were imperialists who visualized the conquest of the continent and gaining access to the Pacific and China. Achieving that goal required land, wealth, and settler participation.

The US tribal homeland was the prototype not only for the South African reserve but also the Nazi concentration camp.”

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.

Although President Truman signed the convention, it went into effect in the United States only in 1988 when the US Congress finally ratified it, the only member state of the United Nations that had not done so. The convention is not retroactive, so the United States is not liable under the Genocide Convention before 1988. The Truman administration had lobbied in favor of it at the United Nations, and President Truman signed the Convention and sent it to the Senate for ratification. There, the all-white Senate expressed concern that genocide charges might result from the history of racial segregation, lynching, and Ku Klux Klan activities. In addition, although the treaty was not retroactive, senators expressed fear that it would be used to define the nineteenth-century US treatment of Native Americans as genocide.

The title of the Genocide Convention is the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (emphasis mine). The law is also about preventing genocide by identifying the elements of government policies or actions that could lead to genocide, rather than only punishment after the fact. Most important, genocide does not have to be complete to be considered genocide, nor does it have to include actual death. Forced assimilation is genocidal, forcibly removing children from their families is genocidal, creating conditions that make it impossible for the group to maintain its integrity is genocidal, all of which can be carried out without death.

The Carlisle boarding school, founded by US Army officer Richard Henry Pratt in 1879, became a model for others established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Pratt said in a speech in 1892, “A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”18 That is the definition of genocide.

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.

“The American right to buy always superseded the Indian right not to sell.”

The Scots Irish had been the settler colonialists of Northern Ireland. Beginning in the early 1600s, the British decided to force Protestantism on the Catholic Irish. They chose to use Lowland Scotland Presbyterians. When British colonization of North America began, many of these Ulster Scots chose to join. They were seasoned usurpers of Indigenous property.

Appalachian scholar Stephen Pearson is one of the few intellectuals from the region to refute the concept of white Appalachians being indigenous and colonized. Exploited by capitalism they have been, but colonized they have never been.

Ammon Bundy claimed that all the land in the refuge once belonged to private ranchers and that the federal government acquired it illegally. Actually, in the nineteenth century, violent and armed white settlers and the federal government seized the land from the Indigenous Northern Paiute Nation, for whom the land was sacred. The federal government forcibly relocated the Paiutes when they resisted settler encroachment. Their residency dates back fourteen thousand years as part of the larger Paiute Nation of the intermountain area.

Referring to the 2016 Dakota pipeline protests taking place during the same period as the trials, geographers Joshua F. J. Inwood and Anne Bonds wrote at the time, Nothing illustrates the fundamental contradictions of the United States settler state quite like the juxtaposition of a jury in Oregon acquitting Bundy and his supporters of the armed takeover . . . while peaceful and non-violent Native Americans in the Dakotas have been subject to state-supported violence while peacefully protesting the construction of a tar-sands oil pipeline through land ceded to the Lakota through a federally recognized treaty,

“The West” is a site of massive white self-indigenizing, as also reflected in the wildly popular Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. The self-indigenizing as first settlers is inherently genocidal with guns a central metaphor.

To imagine the United States as a nation of immigrants, devoid of an indigenous population, is not only a form of erasure; it is also historically inaccurate. The United States was founded as, and continues to be, a nation of settler immigrants locked into a struggle over the meaning of place and belonging with the Native nations of North America.

The enslaved Natchez people were transported from the Gulf of México, down the length of South America over the Atlantic, and around Tierra del Fuego, then north to Perú, a longer passage than from Africa to America.

European indentured servants did not arrive as settlers, but they became settlers.

The colonizers relied on tobacco as a profit-making commodity, which the Indigenous peoples had invented and used only sparingly for ceremonial and medicinal purposes. Within a few years of exporting tobacco to Europe, a burgeoning addicted market flourished, making tobacco a lucrative industrial monocrop for Virginia planters. They had come in search of gold but grew wealthy off a toxic and addictive drug, the beginning of European and later US drug trafficking mixed with wars in Asia.

African American studies historian Robin D. G. Kelley points out that the massive forced transfer of people in the European transatlantic slave trade was a process of elimination: “eliminate the culture, identity, and consciousness while preserving the body for labor.”

Africans also brought seeds; many were Muslims and brought copies of the Koran; they brought the banjo, the African drums, songs, poetry, and the oral tradition of storytelling, providing descendants of the enslaved with historical memory. These traces of African origins were instruments of both survival and resistance that created a new people in the cauldron of enslavement, rapacious capitalism, and colonialism under the fiscal-military state that continues today.

The late Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out that many more enslaved Africans were placed in the Caribbean sugar plantation islands and Brazil than in the thirteen English colonies. “Enslaved Africans worked and died in the Caribbean a century before the settlement at Jamestown,” and the Caribbean as a whole imported the greatest number of enslaved Africans, the second being Brazil.13 This is true, but it was also intentional on the part of British, then European American slavers who trembled in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, even banning the transatlantic slave trade, believing rightly that newly arrived enslaved Africans, such as the Angolans in Haiti, were more likely to rebel while their cultures and languages and memories of freedom were intact.