America started attracting immigrants long before it became a country. Already in the late 1600s and early 1700s, there were newcomers from Germany, Ulster, France, etc. What made them immigrants? They willingly moved to a place, in this case colonies, that had been established and settled by others.
To succeed, they roughly assimilated to the societal structure that welcomed them. That was the optimal solution in a growing nation clearly primed to take immigrants.
Obviously, these newcomers often helped in that settlement. What we know as “Pennsylvania Dutch” are the descendants of German (Deutsch!) Pietists, Mennonites, Amish, and other Protestants that went to that Quaker colony starting in the 1680s. They helped carve out the modern Keystone State.
But the rules of the road had been established by those who founded the colonies, namely the English. Thus, the language of government was English, contracts and disputes were adjudicated by Anglo-Saxon common law, and the customs and habits were those of a people Napoleon disparaged as a “nation of shopkeepers,” adapted to colonial conditions.
This is why, when people such as the late Samuel Huntington write that America is not so much a “nation of immigrants” as a “settler nation,” they have a point. More than 100 million immigrants have come to America since the 1840s, when the immigrant spigots really opened, and they have clearly helped shape the nation.
But America is more a “nation of settlers,” and those settlers were Englishmen who were not just Protestants, but dissenters, or “protesting Protestants.” It is this nucleus that has permanently influenced the American character.
As Edmund Burke put in his 1775 “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies,” religion had a direct impact: “The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favorable to liberty, but built upon it.”
Added Burke, “All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement of the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion.”
This focus on freedom — some critics of America have called it an obsession — has produced not just political liberty but also economic prosperity, the two prime reasons that immigrants have come here.
Now this experience of freedom is being distorted and corrupted in our classrooms and museums. The word “settler” itself has become tainted. “Settler colonialism,” a term we have heard with increasing frequency as higher ed has fallen more and more into the grip of the cultural left, does not mean what Huntington meant.
“Settler colonialism can be defined as a system of oppression based on genocide and colonialism, that aims to displace a population of a nation (oftentimes indigenous people) and replace it with a new settler population,” intones Cornell Law. “Settler colonialism finds its foundations on a system of power perpetuated by settlers that represses indigenous people’s rights and cultures by erasing it and replacing it by their own.”
The people who make this argument base their hatred of America on the taking of lands from the Native Americans. That act, they pretend, precludes observing, let alone celebrating, the unique experiment in freedom that the United States has been. It makes America unworthy of assimilating to.
But one does not have to be an apologist for the colonizing process to observe that this is the case of every nation on earth.
Spain, for example, is the result of the Celts taking over the Iberians, producing Celtiberians, who were themselves taken over by Romans, who were invaded by Visigoths and Suevi, who were then overrun by Arabs and Berbers, who lost Iberia in the Reconquista. England went through a similar (Celtic Britons + Romans + Saxons + Danes + Normans) process. Indian nations fought and displaced other Indian nations.
It is intrinsic to the human condition. No one in their right mind would make a land acknowledgment for “indigenous Britons,” except for the satirical site the Babylon Bee, to make a point.
In America, this process has produced a society that is exceptional because it is the only one rooted in natural law and natural right, where the Constitution is written to limit government, not enhance its power, and that government exists to protect individual rights. It’s vital that incoming immigrants assimilate to the ideas and practices that enable these ideas to thrive.
Legal immigration is a policy tool; the elected representatives of the people, hopefully reading the public will correctly, decide whether they want immigration or not. The Ellis Island entry point was opened in 1892 to handle the inflow, and that experiment was accompanied by a strong assimilationist ethos that included national institutions, New York City, and the private sector.
Ensuring that immigration be legal and orderly, and that it be accompanied by this strong assimilationist effort — and that the immigrants agree to this assimilation — is what reassures people that their culture will not be destroyed. Even legal immigration, devoid of assimilation, represents a threat to cultural continuation. As for illegal immigration, especially massive and unruly, which is what we saw under Biden, it is more akin to the invasions described above — especially when immigrants are officially discouraged from assimilating to the mores of the country.
The people who designed a system of illegal and disorderly immigration, where assimilation is discouraged, sought to destroy the America that existed. They are the ones interested in genocide — cultural genocide.
The term E Pluribus Unum was selected as the national motto when we were dealing with the Germans, Scots-Irish, etc. It is the durable approach.
And it isn’t, despite the cries of alarm from those constantly baying about “settler colonialism” agonistes at Cornell and other Ivies, a system to perpetuate a race in power. The habits, practices, and laws of the country have a racial and ethnic component only in the fevered minds of the fringes on the left and right.
Huntington put it best when he said, “I believe that one of the greatest achievements, perhaps the greatest achievement, of America is the extent to which it has eliminated the racial and ethnic components that historically were central to its identity and has become a multiethnic, multiracial society in which individuals are to be judged on their merits. That happened, I believe, because of the commitment successive generations of Americans have had to the Anglo Protestant Culture and the Creed of the founding settlers. If that commitment is sustained, America will still be America long after Waspish descendants of its founders have become a small and uninfluential minority. That is the America I know and love. It is also, as the evidence in these pages demonstrates, the America most Americans love and want.”
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its board of trustees.