In this short article first published in Monthly Review, <\/em>activist and scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz criticizes the popular conception that the United States is a “nation of immigrants”, demonstrating how this rhetoric of collective immigration obscures a history of settler-colonialism, indigenous dispossession, and white supremacy.<\/p>\n by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Introduction In this short article first published in Monthly Review, activist and scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz criticizes the popular conception that the United States is a “nation of immigrants”, demonstrating how this rhetoric of collective immigration obscures a history of settler-colonialism, indigenous dispossession, and white supremacy. Stop Saying This is a Nation of Immigrants! by Roxanne […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13882119,"featured_media":0,"parent":10036,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-10936","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"es","enabled_languages":["en","es"],"languages":{"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"es":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/PdQxqk-2Qo","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13882119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10936"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12106,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10936\/revisions\/12106"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/workersvoiceus.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Stop Saying This is a Nation of Immigrants!<\/h1>\n
\nA nation of immigrants: This is a convenient myth developed as a response to the 1960s movements against colonialism, neocolonialism, and white supremacy. The ruling class and its brain trust offered multiculturalism, diversity, and affirmative action in response to demands for decolonization, justice, reparations, social equality, an end of imperialism, and the rewriting of history \u2014 not to be \u201cinclusive\u201d \u2014 but to be accurate. What emerged to replace the liberal melting pot idea and the nationalist triumphal interpretation of the \u201cgreatest country on earth and in history,\u201d was the \u201cnation of immigrants\u201d story.
\nBy the 1980s, the \u201cwaves of immigrants\u201d story even included the indigenous peoples who were so brutally displaced and murdered by settlers and armies, accepting the flawed \u201cBering Straits\u201d theory of indigenous immigration some 12,000 years ago. Even at that time, the date was known to be wrong, there was evidence of indigenous presence in the Americas as far back as 50,000 years ago, and probably much longer, and entrance by many means across the Pacific and the Atlantic \u2014 perhaps, as Vine Deloria jr. put it, footsteps by indigenous Americans to other continents will one day be acknowledged. But, the new official history texts claimed, the indigenous peoples were the \u201cfirst immigrants.\u201d They were followed, it was said, by immigrants from England and Africans, then by Irish, and then by Chinese, Eastern and Southern Europeans, Russians, Japanese, and Mexicans. There were some objections from African Americans to referring to enslaved Africans hauled across the ocean in chains as \u201cimmigrants,\u201d but that has not deterred the \u201cnation of immigrants\u201d chorus.
\nMisrepresenting the process of European colonization of North America, making everyone an immigrant, serves to preserve the \u201cofficial story\u201d of a mostly benign and benevolent USA, and to mask the fact that the pre-US independence settlers, were, well, settlers, colonial setters, just as they were in Africa and India, or the Spanish in Central and South America. The United States was founded as a settler state, and an imperialistic one from its inception (\u201cmanifest destiny,\u201d of course). The settlers were English, Welsh, Scots, Scots-Irish, and German, not including the huge number of Africans who were not settlers. Another group of Europeans who arrived in the colonies also were not settlers or immigrants: the poor, indentured, convicted, criminalized, kidnapped from the working class (vagabonds and unemployed artificers), as Peter Linebaugh puts it, many of who opted to join indigenous communities.
\nOnly beginning in the 1840s, with the influx of millions of Irish Catholics pushed out of Ireland by British policies, did what might be called \u201cimmigration\u201d begin. The Irish were discriminated against cheap labor, not settlers. They were followed by the influx of other workers from Scandinavia, Eastern and Southern Europe, always more Irish, plus Chinese and Japanese, although Asian immigration was soon barred. Immigration laws were not even enacted until 1875 when the US Supreme Court declared the regulation of immigration a federal responsibility. The Immigration Service was established in 1891.
\nBuried beneath the tons of propaganda \u2014 from the landing of the English \u201cpilgrims\u201d (fanatic Protestant Christian evangelicals) to James Fennimore Cooper\u2019s phenomenally popular \u201cLast of the Mohicans\u201d claiming \u201cnatural rights\u201d to not only the indigenous peoples territories but also to the territories claimed by other European powers \u2014 is the fact that the founding of the United States was a division of the Anglo empire, with the US becoming a parallel empire to Great Britain. From day one, as was specified in the Northwest Ordinance that preceded the US Constitution, the new republic for empire (as Jefferson called the US) envisioned the future shape of what is now the lower 48 states of the US. They drew up rough maps, specifying the first territory to conquer as the \u201cNorthwest Territory,\u201d ergo the title of the ordinance. That territory was the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region, which was filled with indigenous farming communities.
\nOnce the conquest of the \u201cNorthwest Territory\u201d was accomplished through a combination of genocidal military campaigns and bringing in European settlers from the east, and the indigenous peoples moved south and north for protection into other indigenous territories, the republic for empire annexed Spanish Florida where runaway enslaved Africans and remnants of the indigenous communities that had escaped the Ohio carnage fought back during three major wars (Seminole wars) over two decades. In 1828, President Andrew Jackson (who had been a general leading the Seminole wars) pushed through the Indian Removal Act to force all the agricultural indigenous nations of the Southeast, from Georgia to the Mississippi River, to transfer to Oklahoma territory that had been gained through the \u201cLouisiana Purchase\u201d from France.
\nAnglo settlers with enslaved Africans seized the indigenous agricultural lands for plantation agriculture in the Southern region. Many moved on into the Mexican province of Texas \u2014 then came the US military invasion of Mexico in 1846, seizing Mexico City and forcing Mexico to give up its northern half through the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Texas were then opened to \u201clegal\u201d Anglo settlement, also legalizing those who had already settled illegally, and in Texas by force. The indigenous and the poor Mexican communities in the seized territory, such as the Apache, Navajo, and Comanche, resisted colonization, as they had resisted the Spanish empire, often by force of arms, for the next 40 years. The small class of Hispanic elites welcomed and collaborated with US occupation.
\nAre \u201cimmigrants\u201d the appropriate designation for the indigenous peoples of North America? No.
\nAre \u201cimmigrants\u201d the appropriate designation for enslaved Africans? No.
\nAre \u201cimmigrants\u201d the appropriate designation for the original European settlers? No.
\nAre \u201cimmigrants\u201d the appropriate designation for Mexicans who migrate for work to the United States? No. They are migrant workers crossing a border created by US military force. Many crossing that border now are also from Central America, from the small countries that were ravaged by US military intervention in the 1980s and who also have the right to make demands on the United States.
\nSo, let\u2019s stop saying \u201cthis is a nation of immigrants.\u201d
\nWith thanks to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who gave her permission for this to be republished here. Dunbar-Ortiz’s book<\/em> Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: <\/a><\/span>Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion<\/a><\/span>, which explores this topic in more depth, <\/em><\/span>is due out soon. <\/em>Dunbar-Ortiz is also the author of <\/em>An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, available from Beacon Press,<\/a><\/span> as well as other books that explore related topics.<\/em>
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