As America approaches its 250th birthday, the question of who are the American people who have sustained this nation for two and a half centuries and who will sustain it for ages to come is worthy of exploration. One of the most persistent myths in modern American politics is that America is a “nation of immigrants.” The phrase is repeated so often that few pause to examine what it actually implies, yet it obscures the true source of American success. America’s greatness was never its ability to attract immigrants. It was its ability to turn them into Americans.
America is not a nation of immigrants; America is a nation of assimilants. Immigration is the act of arrival. Assimilation is the act of becoming. Our most successful immigrants do not remain what they were before they arrived. They become Americans and embrace our culture, institutions, and way of life. Human beings have migrated throughout history, and every empire, trading port, and frontier society has drawn newcomers, but there is nothing uniquely American about immigration itself.
What made the American experiment remarkable was the capacity to transform strangers into fellow countrymen. The immigrant arrived as an Italian, a German, an Irishman, a Pole, a Greek, a Jew, a Swede, a Cuban, or a Vietnamese, and his children became Americans. That transformation was the miracle. Today one of the central debates on the right asks whether America is fundamentally a creed or a nation. Is it simply a set of ideas open to anyone who professes them, or is it a particular people living in a particular place with a particular inheritance?
The question itself is flawed because you cannot separate the people from the idea. The American creed did not descend from the heavens. It was forged by a particular people, in a particular place, under a particular set of historical circumstances. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the institutions of self-government were the political achievements of the American people. At the same time, the American people are more than an ethnic group occupying a continent, and what binds us is a shared inheritance of laws, institutions, customs, memories, symbols, stories, and ideals.
The people need the creed as much as the creed needs the people. Without the creed, America becomes just another nation-state. Without the people, America becomes merely a theory. America is the product of both ideas and the real historical experience of a real people. John Jay understood this when he described Americans in Federalist 2 as “one united people” inhabiting “one connected country.” The Constitution was not written for humanity in the abstract. It was written for a people already bound together by common habits, common memories, and common affections.
The Founders did not create Americans, but rather Americans created the Founding. Later at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln did not describe America as merely a proposition. He called it a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The proposition gave the nation its purpose, and the nation gave the proposition life. The creed and the country cannot be separated.
One of the most revealing observations about the limits of legal status and abstract belief came from Malcolm X. In 1964 he declared, “No, I’m not an American.” Malcolm was not denying his citizenship. He was insisting that merely occupying the territory or holding the documents does not make someone fully part of the nation. I disagree with his conclusion—black Americans were and are full and equal members of the American people and the American nation—but Malcolm’s underlying insight was nevertheless profound and correct.
A nation is more than paperwork, territory, or even shared political principles. A nation is a people bound together by shared loyalties, memories, institutions, and affections. Ironically, Malcolm X grasped something that many modern advocates of a purely creedal America still miss. Genuine membership requires more than presence or profession. It requires joining the people in their common life.
Theodore Roosevelt made the same point with characteristic force. In 1919 he wrote:
If the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American…. There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all.
Assimilation, in other words, is not exclusion. It is the pathway to full and equal membership in the American people. The immigrant who takes that path does not lose a heritage. He gains a home, a people, and a future he can pass on to his children. George Washington understood this when he wrote that a common country has a right to “concentrate your affections.” Affection is not a legal category. It is loyalty and belonging. It is the conviction that this country is yours and that you are responsible for its future.
This abandonment of “concentrated affections” is where modern America has lost its way. For decades Americans have been told that “diversity is our strength”, meaning the racial and cultural diversity that immigration brings. The reality is that diversity is not our strength. Diversity is simply a fact. A nation can be diverse and strong. It can be diverse and weak. It can be diverse and united. It can be diverse and fractured. Diversity itself tells us almost nothing. What matters is whether a nation possesses the cultural confidence to transform diversity into unity.
America’s strength was never that we came from different places. America’s strength was that we became one people, the opposite of diversity. The national motto captures this perfectly with the phrase E Pluribus Unum: out of many, one. Notice the direction of the phrase. It does not celebrate permanent fragmentation or diversity. It celebrates the creation of a common national identity. The old American model was simple. We welcomed immigrants, and we expected them to become Americans. That model succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
The Irish did not remain permanently Irish, nor the Italians Italian, nor the Poles Polish. They and their descendants became Americans. They learned English, adopted American customs, served in American armies, built American businesses, and married other Americans. They moved across the continent and made America’s history their own. The result was not multiculturalism. The result was nationhood.
This is why the phrase “nation of immigrants” ultimately misses the point. The defining feature of America was never immigration. The defining feature of America was assimilation into the American nation. Anyone can become an American. That is one of the greatest strengths of the American nation, but not everyone will and not everyone wants to.
Anyone can join us, but joining us requires becoming one of us. That is not exclusionary. It is the very essence of nationhood. Every successful nation in history has required newcomers to adopt the loyalties, obligations, and identity of the nation they join, and America is no different. The immigrant who assimilates contributes enormously to America, not because he adds another category to a demographic spreadsheet, but because he strengthens the American people themselves.
The assimilant becomes part of the American story. He inherits the American creed and loyalty to the American people and in doing so he helps carry the nation forward. No modern figure illustrates this truth more powerfully than Elon Musk. Born in South Africa, he immigrated to the United States, became an American citizen, and built companies that made him the richest man in the world. Through SpaceX, he restored American space predominance and reestablished national pride after a period in which we shamefully relied on the Russians for access to space. None of this could have happened anywhere else. Only in America could an immigrant arrive with ambition and determination, fully join the American people, and create enterprises of such scale that they directly strengthen the nation’s technological leadership, industrial capacity, and strategic position for generations to come.
America is not a proposition floating in the air. It is not an ethnicity. It is not merely an economic zone or a set of borders. America is a people, living in a place, carrying an idea. That is what previous generations built and what assimilation preserved.
An insistence on the assimilation of immigrants is what we must recover on the occasion of our 250th birthday as a nation if we wish to remain one nation, under God, indivisible, for generations to come. America is not a nation of immigrants. It is a nation of assimilants, and it must remain one if it is to enjoy another 250 years.
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