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

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

This idea of the gift-giving Indian helping to establish and enrich the development of the United States is a screen that obscures the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources, reducing the Indigenous population, and forcibly relocating and incarcerating them in reservations.

In North Dakota, where immigrants represented about 4 percent of residents, immigrant numbers increased by 87 percent after 2010, while West Virginia and South Dakota increased in foreign-born residents by a third, and Kentucky and Tennessee by over one-fifth.

Although the United States occupied Hawai’i and overthrew its constitutional monarchy as a prelude to the invasion and occupation of the Philippines, Guam, and other Pacific islands in the late nineteenth century, the US Congress long considered Hawai’i to be unqualified for statehood, because it was “Asiatic,” which was the reason that none of the Pacific territories the US held were considered for statehood. But the resident US citizen settlers in Hawai’i, who had been uninvited businessmen and missionaries even before the US occupation, desired statehood and lobbied hard for it.

Hawai’i became a state in 1959, despite the fact that as an island subjected to Western colonization, it was eligible for independence under international law. In 1946, Hawai’i was deemed a non-self-governing territory and placed on the UN List of Non-Self-Governing Territories, but it was unilaterally removed from that list in 1959 when the US government reported to the UN that Hawai’i had achieved self-government. The same applied to Alaska.

Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd extends the term arrivant, which refers to enslaved Africans transported against their will, to refugees and immigrants forced out of their homelands; that is, “those people forced into the Americas through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonialism and imperialism around the globe.”

But the migrant forced into migration to the United States or other states structured on settler colonialism—Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel—is susceptible, as Saranillio points out, to the ideology of settler colonialism, which in the United States is imprinted in the content of patriotism, Americanism. Without consciousness of and resistance to this pull, the migrant can passively contribute to the continued settler-colonial order.

The Eurocentric model of a proletarian revolution challenging, much less overcoming, the US fiscal-military capitalist and imperialist state has not and will not work. A revolutionary working class must be able to acknowledge its enemy and eschew not only capitalism but also colonialism and imperialism.