[The thrust of American struggles has been to deracialize but not
to decolonize. A deracialized America still remains a settler society
and a settler state.] [[link removed]]

NOT A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS  
[[link removed]]

 

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
September 1, 2021
Monthly Review
[[link removed]]

*
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_ The thrust of American struggles has been to deracialize but not to
decolonize. A deracialized America still remains a settler society and
a settler state. _

Fallen Christopher Columbus statue outside the Minnesota State
Capitol after a group led by American Indian Movement members tore it
down in St. Paul, Minnesota on June 10, 2020., By Tony Webster -
Flickr, CC BY 2.0

 

On George Washington’s birthday, 2018, the Donald Trump
administration’s director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services, L. Francis Cissna, changed the agency’s official mission
statement, dropping the language of “a nation of immigrants” to
describe the United States. The previous mission statement had said
the agency “secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants by
providing accurate and useful information to our customers, granting
immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and
understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our
immigration system.”1
[[link removed]] The
revised mission statement reads: “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services administers the nation’s lawful immigration system,
safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly
adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting
Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.”2
[[link removed]]

The Trump administration’s official negation of the United States as
a nation of immigrants was unlikely to change the liberal rhetoric.
During Joe Biden’s 2020 bid for the presidency, the campaign issued
a statement on his immigration plan, titled “The Biden Plan for
Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants,” asserting that
“unless your ancestors were native to these shores, or forcibly
enslaved and brought here as part of our original sin as a nation,
most Americans can trace their family history back to a choice—a
choice to leave behind everything that was familiar in search of new
opportunities and a new life.”3
[[link removed]] Unlike
the previous “nation of immigrants” statement, the Biden campaign
did acknowledge prior and continuing Native presence, as well as
specifying that enslaved Africans were not immigrants. However, the
new rhetoric continues to mask the settler-colonial violence that
established and maintained the United States and turns immigrants into
settlers.

It appears ironic that Trump positioned himself as anti-immigrant,
being the son of an immigrant mother (from Scotland) and the grandson
of an immigrant paternal grandfather (from Germany), as well as being
married to an immigrant (from Slovenia). But Trump was not against
European immigrants. In a January 2018 staff meeting on temporary
immigration status, Trump asked, “Why do we need more Haitians? Take
them out.… Why are we having all these people from shithole
countries come here? Why do we want all these people from Africa here?
They’re shithole countries.… We should have more people from
Norway.”4
[[link removed]] The
month before, referring again to Haitians, Trump said that they “all
have AIDS,” and about Nigerians, he said that once they had seen the
United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in
Africa.5
[[link removed]]

In his quest for the presidency, Trump made immigration the center of
his campaign, focusing on the exclusion of Mexicans, promising to
build a border wall and militarize the southern border. He claimed
that “the U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s
problems,” and railed that, “when Mexico sends its people,
they’re not sending their best. They’re bringing drugs. They’re
bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good
people, but I speak to border guards.”6
[[link removed]]

Democratic Party politicians and liberals in general insisted that
Trump and his supporters were un-American in denying the
nation-of-immigrants ideology that has been a consensus for more than
a half century and remains a basic principle of the Democratic Party.
Most people around the world viewed the United States as a nation of
immigrants, while questioning if the country was backsliding on its
promise in electing Trump.

With the Democratic Party back in power in 2021, the
nation-of-immigrants rhetoric appears to be firmly back in place,
although the exclusionary policies of the United States will continue
as they did during the Barack Obama administration.

As Osha Gray Davidson, who has collected dozens of examples of how
“nation of immigrants” is used, points out, the phrase is
generally used to counter xenophobic fears.7
[[link removed]] But
the ideology behind it also works to erase the scourge of settler
colonialism and the lives of Indigenous peoples. “We in America are
immigrants, or the children of immigrants,” is the refrain.8
[[link removed]] The
theme of Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech as the Republican nominee
for president in 2012 included “a nation of immigrants”:
“Optimism is uniquely American. It is what brought us to America. We
are a nation of immigrants.”9
[[link removed]] Speaking
at a Nevada high school to a large audience, President Obama said:
“We are a nation of immigrants, and that means we are constantly
being replenished with fighters who believed in the American dream,
and it gives us a tremendous advantage over other nations.”10
[[link removed]] Presidential
candidate Hillary Clinton, in 2016, evoked a nation of immigrants,
with “the Statue of Liberty reminding us of who we are and where we
came from. We are a nation of immigrants, and I am proud of it.”11
[[link removed]]

“A nation of immigrants” was a mid–twentieth-century revisionist
origin story. The United States emerged from the Second World War
undamaged by bombs and heavy population loss, which was the experience
of most combatant nations. In fact, the United States became a
beefed-up industrial powerhouse exhibiting military might, including
the atomic bomb. It was poised to become the economic, military, and
moral leader of the “free world.” The Soviet Union, the country
that actually defeated the army of the Third Reich, was the new
adversary. U.S. postwar administrations scrambled to conceal any trace
of the U.S. colonialist roots, system of slavery, and continued
segregation as they developed military and counterinsurgent strategies
to quell national liberation movements in former European colonies.
The Soviet Union and Communist China, which took power in 1949,
denounced Western imperialism and colonialism in Africa, Asia, Latin
America, the Pacific, and the Caribbean.

In 1958, then U.S. 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.12
[[link removed]] This
thesis was embraced by U.S. historians and found its way into
textbooks and school curricula. 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. Aspiring to the
presidency, Kennedy introduced a clear context and narrative in which
he could transform this negative into a positive. This founding text
of “a nation of immigrants” was published during Kennedy’s
1953–59 first term as U.S. senator from Massachusetts, two years
before he was elected president.

Given that, in the twenty-first century, immigration is practically
synonymous with the México-U.S. border established in 1848, it is
striking that Kennedy never mentioned México or Mexicans or the
U.S.-México border in the text, nor did he use the
terms _Latino_ or _Hispanic_. Yet, this was 1958, late in the
period of the contract labor Bracero Program, which began during the
Second World War. A total of two million Mexican citizens, with the
participation of the Mexican government, migrated to the United
States, particularly California, as de facto indentured agricultural
workers under time-limited contracts. Meanwhile, the burgeoning
agribusiness industry in California recruited even more Mexican
workers outside the program, without documentation or civil rights,
and subject to deportation. More egregious than Kennedy’s omission
of any mention of México or the border is that the federal program
known by its offensive official name “Operation Wetback” began
during Kennedy’s first year as senator and continued beyond his
senatorial career through his presidency. “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 U.S. citizens—to
illegal search, detention, and deportation, forcing them to forfeit
their property. Workers were deported by air, trains, and ships far
from the border, leaving those who were U.S. citizens stranded and
without the documents enabling them to return to their homes in the
United States. “Operation Wetback” was a repeat of the Herbert
Hoover administration’s deportation of a million Mexicans in the
1930s, dubbed “Mexican Repatriation.”

Regarding the status of Indigenous peoples in Kennedy’s
nation-of-immigrants scheme, the then senator wrote: “Another way of
indicating the importance of immigration to America is to point out
that every American who ever lived, with the exception of one group,
was either an immigrant himself or a descendant of immigrants.” The
exception, Kennedy went on, was “Will Rogers, part Cherokee Indian,
[who] said that his ancestors were at the docks to meet the
Mayflower.” But Kennedy disagreed, claiming that “some
anthropologists believe that the Indians themselves were immigrants
from another continent who displaced the original Settlers—the
aborigines.” This is the bogus speculation of U.S. 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.”13
[[link removed]]

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” or that “the Japanese and Chinese brought
their gentle dreams to the West Coast.” He failed to mention the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or its extension a few years later to
all Asians.

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 U.S. ruling-class response to the challenges of the
post-Second World War anticolonial national liberation movements, as
well as civil and human rights social movements domestically. In the
United States, the National Congress of American Indians was founded
in 1944 by D’Arcy McNickle, Helen Peterson, and other longtime
Indigenous activists. At the same time, African-American attorneys and
other professionals were developing a legal strategy for desegregating
public schools, while in 1951, more radical African Americans,
including Paul Robeson and members of the Civil Rights Congress,
petitioned the recently established United Nations with the detailed
document _We Charge Genocide_, based on the 1948 UN Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. A mass movement
against segregation was emerging. Around the same time, Native
American activists were contextualizing the situation of Native
nations within the decolonization/national liberation context, and
Mexican farmworkers were organizing in the fields, defeating the
Bracero Program and forming unions.

These cracks in the racial order of settler colonialism and capitalism
constituted a radical departure in a society locked down in
patriarchal white domination and obsessed with “real” Americanism.
At the end of the Second World War, the U.S. social, economic, and
political order was solidly and confidently a white patriarchal
Protestant republic, dominated by corporations with worldwide
investments and financial reserves, along with a massive military
machine far greater than that of any other country in the world.
Unionization movements, primarily made up of white workers, were
seduced by home ownership and middle-class status, their unions
becoming business oriented with their own profit-making privatized
health care, while the United Kingdom and Western European states
responded to militant union demands to institute universal, public
health care. Black descendants of enslaved Africans lived under a
totalitarian Jim Crow system in the former Confederate states and were
ghettoized and discriminated against when they escaped the South in
migrations for northern and coastal industrial urban areas that were
stalked by police forces resembling slave patrols. Native Americans
were abandoned on shrunken land bases that could not support life,
forcing many to find work in nearby or faraway cities, while Congress
began reversing New Deal reforms that had acknowledged the Native land
base and governments. This culminated in the congressional termination
of Native status and land bases in 1953, an erasure that took the Red
Power movement two decades to reverse. Meanwhile, Irish and Central,
Southern, and Eastern European immigrants, mainly Catholics and Jews,
had made gains in being accepted as equal—that is, as white. But on
the West Coast, U.S. citizens of Chinese and Mexican descent were
discriminated against and subject to deportation, while U.S. citizens
of Japanese descent had been incarcerated in wartime concentration
camps, stripped of their property and citizenship rights. Ads for jobs
segregated men and women as well as white and Black, with lower wages
for women and Black workers. Ivy League universities were
overwhelmingly white and for men only, with quotas to limit the number
of Jewish men.

The explosion that cracked the white republic was the 1954 U.S.
Supreme Court school desegregation decision under Chief Justice Earl
Warren, who ironically, as the wartime attorney general of California,
had facilitated rounding up Japanese Americans for federal
incarceration. Based on decades of organizing for African-American
desegregation, the order for school desegregation under _Brown v.
Board of Education of Topeka_ was a great achievement, but the
backlash commenced immediately. White Citizens’ Councils organized
all over the United States, linking racial integration with communism
and labeling it un-American. Within three years of the Supreme Court
desegregation decision, the white nationalist John Birch Society was
launched by Robert Welch, the heir to the Welch candy fortune in
Massachusetts, along with others such as Fred Koch, father of the Koch
brothers, who, in the twenty-first century, have funded legislation
and movements to end all government benefits and promote the
privatization of public goods. The Supreme Court composition was the
target of this white nationalist movement, using the Republican Party
as the vehicle, and had largely achieved its goals with the Trump
administration’s appointment of three justices, shifting the
court’s ideological spectrum to five ultraconservative justices, one
moderate conservative, and three liberal ones.14
[[link removed]]

The promise of permanent progress was the context within which the
Black civil rights movement grew and contributed momentum to other
ongoing movements for liberation, including Puerto Rican independence
and Native American self-determination, as well as the Mexican
farmworker unionization movement of the 1960s, the women’s and LGBTQ
rights movements, and the rising student anti-imperialist and antiwar
movements that grew in opposition to the accelerating U.S. war to
overthrow the government of Vietnam. The counterrevolution against
these advances brought Richard Nixon, then Ronald Reagan, to the
presidency. By the 1990s, capitalism and militarism were triumphant in
dissolving the Eastern European socialist bloc and organized
liberation movements that had taken state power in Africa, Asia, and
the Caribbean, which became shadows of their former aspirations.

The first highly visible sign of a well-organized counterrevolution
inside the United States vying for political power was the evangelical
anti-abortion mass movement that soared following the _Roe v.
Wade_ Supreme Court decision to decriminalize abortion in 1973. 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 U.S. Constitution. Parallel to postwar
liberation movements, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency ran
counterinsurgent operations against national liberation movements
before and after they took power in Latin America, the Caribbean, the
Pacific, and Africa, while J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of
Investigation ran similar operations against domestic movements,
including COINTELPRO, a domestic counterintelligence program.
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 ’70s, while the U.S. war in
Vietnam raged, the then liberal U.S. 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 U.S. imperialism, counterinsurgency,
and overthrow of governments. Given attempts to offset an exclusive
emphasis on white settler history and the winning of the West as the
nationalist triumphal narrative, “a nation of immigrants” fit the
multicultural agenda. No longer was the United States a “melting
pot” of assimilation to whiteness but rather a many-colored quilt.
Kennedy’s _A Nation of Immigrants_ had called the United States
“a nation of nations.” Despite the surging of white nationalism
during the twelve-year period of the Reagan-Bush administrations, by
the early 1990s, the “waves of immigrants,” “nation of
immigrants,” and Native peoples as “the first immigrants”
narrative Kennedy had conceived was a consensus concept as it entered
public school textbooks. This neoliberalism also triggered textbook
wars over history standards, with the right wing pushing for and
demanding a return to the original narrative, especially founding
fathers iconography to support their constitutional philosophy of
“originalism.”

During the nearly two centuries of British colonization of the North
Atlantic coast and up to U.S. independence, the great majority of
European U.S. settlers were Protestant Anglo-Saxon, Scots-Irish, and
German-speaking (before Germany was a nation-state). From 1619 onward,
there was a steadily increasing number of enslaved Africans. When the
United States won independence, the founders inscribed in the
Constitution the requirement that citizenship could be held by white
males only. Despite expressed fears, especially by Alexander Hamilton
and the Federalist Party regarding immigration and the Alien and
Sedition Acts, no immigration laws or procedures existed, not even
during the arrival in the 1840s of 1.5 million Irish famine refugees.
In 1875, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that only the federal
government, not the states, could create immigration laws and that
regulation of immigration was a federal matter, though the federal
immigration service was not established until 1891. Tellingly, the
first federal immigration law, which created the foundation for U.S.
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. Although immigrant bashing is not new, and has
long targeted Asian and Mexican workers, it has become a more fraught
issue as it crystallized in the late twentieth century and accelerated
in the early twenty-first century, targeting Mexicans, Asians, and
Arab Muslims.

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. Such advocates were
caught by surprise and in shock when Mexican hating led to a
successful presidential campaign in 2016, and even more surprised by
the January 6, 2021, white nationalist violent takeover of the U.S.
capitol.

The elephant in the room of immigration is the U.S. military invasion
and annexation of half of Mexican territory that spanned more than two
decades, from 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 U.S. topography. The United
States has a foundational problem of white nationalism that was not
new to 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.15
[[link removed]] These
descendants are most obvious in the former Confederate and border
states, but are also in reality scattered in clusters and communities
in all parts of the United States. They are the latter-day carriers of
the U.S. national origin myth, a matrix of stories that attempt 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
Zionist settlers in Palestine—all established by an imaginary
God-given covenant making them the chosen peoples.

Given the powerful influence of this cultural, religious, and
demographic minority, it is essential to acknowledge its existence in
order to understand persistent white supremacy and mistrust of
non-European immigrants as well as Indigenous North Americans,
descendants of enslaved Africans, and Mexicans. Since the Iranian
revolution of 1978–79, the United States has launched
counterinsurgent wars in Afghanistan and Arab countries, accelerating
anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States. And although U.S.
evangelicals enthusiastically support the settler state of Israel,
which matches their religious belief that Jesus will return when Jews
return to Jerusalem, there is an underlying anti-Semitism in U.S.
white nationalism, mostly centered on a narrative of imagined Jewish
domination, which works to transfer responsibility for capitalist
exploitation from European and European U.S. ruling classes to a
behind-the-scenes Jewish conspiracy and control. The sacred text of
U.S. white nationalists, _The Turner Diaries_, first published in
1978, is a fictional illustration of that anti-Semitism. It is mixed
with hatred of Black Americans and all people of color, the argument
being that Jews use people of color to conceal their devious plan of
dominance, and that the Black civil rights movement was controlled by
Jews, because white nationalists deem people of color as not fully
human and incapable of theory or action on their own.16
[[link removed]]

Those current realities and their history underlie the narrative of
the nation of immigrants. We can see this, for example, in the
contemporary neoliberal celebration of founding father Alexander
Hamilton. During the Obama administration, the nation-of-immigrants
chorus became a best-selling musical, celebrating Hamilton as an
immigrant. More than a year after Hamilton premiered on Broadway in
2015, writer and director Lin-Manuel Miranda, who is of Puerto Rican
heritage, staged a private performance at the White House for
President Obama and his family and invitees. Before the show began,
Obama spoke in praise of the work, saying that, “in the character of
Hamilton—a striving immigrant who escaped poverty, made his way to
the New World, climbed to the top by sheer force of will and pluck and
determination—Lin-Manuel saw something of his own family, and every
immigrant family.”17
[[link removed]] Portraying
Hamilton as an immigrant, although he was a British colonial settler
in New York and virulently suspicious of “aliens,” obfuscates
while celebrating his role, as a federalist, in structuring the
fiscal-military state, a capitalist state created for war. Further,
portraying continental-based Puerto Ricans as immigrants obscures the
continued U.S. colonization of Puerto Rico.

Yet, the genesis of the first full-fledged settler state in the world
went beyond its predecessors in 1492 Iberia and British-colonized
Ireland, with an economy based on land sales and enslaved African
labor, and the implementation of the fiscal-military state. Both the
liberal and right-wing versions of the national narrative misrepresent
the process of European colonization of North America. Both narratives
serve the critical function of preserving the “official story” of
a mostly benign and benevolent United States as an anticolonial
movement that overthrew British colonialism. The pre-U.S. independence
settlers were colonial settlers just as they were in Africa and India
or like the Spanish in Central and South America. 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. Buried beneath the tons of propaganda—from the landing of
the English “pilgrims” (Protestant Christian evangelicals) to
James Fenimore Cooper’s phenomenally popular _The Last of the
Mohicans_ claiming settlers’ “natural rights” not only to the
Indigenous peoples’ territories but also to the territories claimed
by other European powers—is the fact that the founding of the United
States created a division of the Anglo empire, with the U.S. becoming
a parallel empire to Great Britain, ultimately overcoming it. From day
one, as was specified in the Northwest Ordinance, which preceded the
U.S. Constitution, the new “republic for empire,” as Thomas
Jefferson called the new United States, envisioned the future shape of
what is now the forty-eight states of the continental United States.
The founders drew up rough maps, specifying the first territory to
conquer as the “Northwest Territory.” That territory was the Ohio
Valley and the Great Lakes region, which was already populated with
Indigenous villages and farming communities thousands of years old.
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.

The narrative of the nation of immigrants also excludes the history of
enslaved Africans, who were hauled in chains thousands of miles from
their villages and fields, naked and with no belongings, and forcibly
denied not only their freedom but also their languages, customs,
histories, and nationalities. Not only were they used as forced and
unpaid labor, but their very bodies were legally private property to
be bought and sold, soon creating a thriving, legal domestic slave
market, which by 1840 was of greater monetary value than all other
property combined, including all the gold in circulation, all bank
reserves, and all real estate.18
[[link removed]] The
Cotton Kingdom was the fiscal-military center of U.S. capitalist
development with the industrial production of cotton, giving rise to a
permanent racial capitalism, even after legalized slavery ended.
Plantation owners and managers maintained a military-like
counterinsurgency to control the enslaved workers, often calling in
the U.S. army to quell insurrections. During Reconstruction, following
the Civil War, Ku Klux Klan terrorism against Black political and
economic power was the result of the inadequacy of the U.S. army
occupation of the former Confederate states. Army divisions were being
shifted west of the Mississippi to destroy Native nations and seize
the rest of continent. With the end of the occupation, Jim Crow
segregation laws gave rise to a form of policing that spread in the
twentieth century to major urban areas as African Americans fled the
South and that continues in the twenty-first century. The Fourteenth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified after the Civil War,
changed all-white citizenship to include those African Americans freed
from enslavement (although still male only), but continued
segregation, discrimination, and police killings, creating a kind of
contingency of full citizenship.

Anglo settlers seized the agricultural lands of Indigenous peoples of
the Southeast for plantation agribusiness in cotton and importing
enslaved people from the original slave states for the grueling labor.
One group of U.S. slavers moved into the Mexican province of Texas
soon after the Mexican people won their decade-long war for
independence from Spain. The two-year U.S. military invasion of
México that began in 1846 finally seized México City in 1848. Under
U.S. occupation, the Mexican government, through the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo, was forced to relinquish the northern half of its
territory. What became the states of California, Arizona, New México,
Colorado, Utah, and Texas were then opened to Anglo settlement, and in
the process legalizing those Anglo slavers in Texas who had already
settled there illegally. The Indigenous nations in the seized
territory—the Apache, Navajo, Kiowa, and Comanche—resisted U.S.
conquest for decades, as they had resisted the Spanish empire. The
small class of Hispano elite in New México had welcomed and
collaborated with U.S. occupation, which led to late-twentieth-century
Hispano claims of indigeneity while living on lands their ancestors
had forcibly taken from the Indigenous pueblos. This then was another
site of the fiscal-military state and racial capitalism taking hold to
contribute to U.S. imperial dominance.

Meanwhile, the English colonization of Ireland led to the 1840s famine
and the first mass migration to the United States. The Irish refugees
were mostly Catholic and despised by the majority U.S.
Anglo-Protestants, but they quickly became the nation’s
second-largest European national group, a political force with which
to be reckoned. Many settled in urban slums and had few skills, having
been agricultural workers. They took whatever unskilled jobs they
could find, the men and boys working on the docks, pushing carts,
digging canals, and constructing the railroad, and obtaining work as
slave patrollers in the Cotton Kingdom and early urban police forces.
Women worked as housekeepers and nannies, in factories, and often in
sex work. How subsequent generations of Irish Americans became
settlers, even one of their own ascending to the presidency in 1960,
is a tragic story.19
[[link removed]] As
well, the nearly cult-like formation of twentieth century urban police
forces and the Federal Bureau of Investigation drew on Irish recruits
until they became dominant and definitive as police. Racialized urban
policing increasingly became a major component of the fiscal-military
state.

Then there were European immigrants, mostly Catholic and Jewish, who
were considered not quite white. During the 1880s alone, more than
five million Central and Eastern Europeans arrived in search of jobs
in burgeoning industrial and mining sites in the Northeast, Midwest,
and West. Many Jewish immigrants were fleeing pogroms, while other
immigrants, particularly German, were driven out by political
repression and brought with them strong organizational experience that
was socialistically inclined. The immigrant-driven workers’
movements forced the reformulation of industrial capitalism, but their
status as immigrants made them vulnerable to political deportation in
the early twentieth century. During that period, Italian immigrants
arrived, mostly from southern Italy. Suffering the stigma of being
Catholic and also dark complected, they were subjected to extreme
discrimination. Italians and other Catholic immigrants became
Americanized and accepted as white through the Roman Catholic Church
and a process rooted in the myth of Columbus, especially with the 1882
founding of the Knights of Columbus and the subsequent
four-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus’s first landing in the
Caribbean. This, too, was another self-indigenizing process, with the
Catholic Columbus being positioned as the original founding father of
the United States.

The origins and staying power of the Western panic against Asian
immigrants moved from medieval Europe to the U.S. Chinese Exclusion
Act of May 6, 1882, and into the twenty-first century. All European
U.S. trade unions were corrupted and weakened by their anti-Chinese
bigotry and support for barring Chinese workers, which accelerated the
spread of yellow peril racism. In Oakland, California, socialist,
union activist, and celebrity writer Jack London was among the loudest
voices spewing hatred. Yellow peril suspicions also led to the
internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent under the liberal
Franklin Roosevelt administration. Fear of Asians in general and of
the Chinese in particular persists today with the U.S. reaction to
China’s economic development.

Since the early twentieth century, immigrant hating in the United
States is primarily about Mexicans (not Latinos in general) and is
directly related to the unsettled border established in 1848 when the
U.S. annexed half of México. 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 U.S. aggression against México and Mexicans,
militarily and economically as well as ideologically, from Walt
Whitman to Patrick Buchanan and Trump. In fact, the United States is
responsible for the waves of refugees from Latin American countries,
due to imperialism, who are then criminalized and their children
deported, dispersed, and even lost in the ongoing situation at the
US-México border.

What, then, is the position of immigrants in a settler state? One of
the unspoken requirements for immigrants and their descendants to
become fully “American” has been to participate in anti-Black
racism and to aspire to “whiteness.” With the post-Second World
War work of civil rights, Black Power, and other antiracist movements,
whiteness lost much of its desirability for several generations. This
process coincided with and influenced the 1965 immigration reform law
that removed restrictions on immigration that had been in effect since
the 1924 immigration law, which limited immigration to Western
Europeans. Thereby, since the late 1960s, greater numbers of
immigrants have come from the Global South, mostly from formerly
colonized countries, and many of them refugees from civil wars or
U.S.-instigated wars in their countries. The “new” immigrants are
more likely than past immigrants to be college graduates or
professionals. They often experience racism and “othering” in
their daily lives, and for Muslims in particular, virulent hostility,
which for some leads to solidarity with antiracist movements. How they
as immigrants experience and react to settler colonialism varies, with
some becoming dedicated to solidarity with Native peoples’
resistance while most remain indifferent or even negate the demands of
Indigenous communities and the reality of settler colonialism.
Although immigrants from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the
Caribbean are not pressured to become “white,” as immigrants were
in the past, they do automatically become settlers unless they resist
that default. Antiracism and diversity are widely accepted, but the
problem is the general denial or refusal to acknowledge settler
colonialism. As Mahmood Mamdani observes, “the thrust of American
struggles has been to deracialize but not to decolonize. A
deracialized America still remains a settler society and a settler
state.”20
[[link removed]]

Notes

* ↩
[[link removed]] Safia
Samee Ali, “S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Drops ‘Nation
of Immigrants’ from Mission Statement
[[link removed]],”
NBC News, February 22, 2018.
* ↩
[[link removed]] “Mission
and Core Values
[[link removed]],” U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services, accessed July 26, 2021.
* ↩
[[link removed]] “The
Biden Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants
[[link removed]],” Biden-Harris, accessed July
26, 2021.
* ↩
[[link removed]] “President
Donald Trump Calls Haiti and African Countries ‘Shithole’ Nations
| NBC Nightly News [[link removed]],”
YouTube video by NBC News, January 11, 2018.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Michael
D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld, “Stoking Fears, Trump Defied
Bureaucracy to Advance Immigration Agenda,” New York Times,
December 23, 2017.
* ↩
[[link removed]] “Donald
Trump Presidential Announcement Speech: US Became Dumping Ground |
China | Mexico [[link removed]],”
YouTube video by Mango News, June 18, 2015; “Fact Checking Donald
Trump’s Immigration Comments
[[link removed]],” YouTube video by
CNN, July 2, 2015.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Osha
Davidson, The American Project
[[link removed]] (podcast), season
1, January 15, 2020–January 21, 2021.
* ↩
[[link removed]] “A
Nation of Immigrants,” YouTube video by BuzzFeedVideo, March 2,
2017.
* ↩
[[link removed]] “Transcript:
Mitt Romney’s Acceptance Speech
[[link removed]],”
NPR, August 30, 2012.
* ↩
[[link removed]] “NV:
OBAMA-WE ARE A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS
[[link removed]],” YouTube video by
CNN, March 31, 2016.
* ↩
[[link removed]] “Clinton:
‘We Are a Nation of Immigrants
[[link removed]],’” YouTube video by
AP Archive, November 16, 2016; “Tim Kaine: ‘We’re a Nation of
Immigrants’ | NBC News
[[link removed]],” YouTube video by NBC
News, October 4, 2016.
* ↩
[[link removed]] John
F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants (1958; repr., New York: Harper
Perennial Modern Classics, 2018). This is the most recent of dozens of
editions of the book, following its first printing in 1958.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Kennedy, A
Nation of Immigrants, 2–3.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Erwin
Chemerinsky, “Chemerinsky: Predicting the Supreme Court in 2021 May
Be Dangerous and Futile
[[link removed]],” ABA
Journal, December 18, 2020.
* ↩
[[link removed]] See
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second
Amendment (San Francisco: City Lights, 2019).
* ↩
[[link removed]] Andrew
Macdonald (pseudonym for William Pierce), The Turner
Diaries (Mountain City, TN: Cosmotheist Books, 2018). See also Brad
Whitsel, “The Turner Diaries and Cosmotheism: William Pierce’s
Theology,” in Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent
Religions 1, no. 2 (1998): 183–97.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Barack
Obama, “Remarks by the President at ‘Hamilton at the White House
[[link removed]],’”
White House, Office of the Press Secretary, March 14, 2016.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Walter
Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton
Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2013), 252–53.
* ↩
[[link removed]] See
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge,
1995).
* ↩
[[link removed]] Mahmood
Mamdani, “Settler Colonialism: Then and Now,” Critical
Inquiry 41, no. 3 (2015): 607.

_ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ grew up in rural Oklahoma in a tenant farming
family. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement
for more than 4 decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to
national and international social justice issues. Dunbar-Ortiz is the
winner of the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize, and is the author or
editor of many books, including An Indigenous Peoples’ History of
the United States, a recipient of the 2015 American Book Award. 
Connect with her at reddirtsite.com or on Twitter @rdunbaro._

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