America is not a “nation of immigrants,” and never has been, but there has been a generations-long effort to make Americans feel a false sense of camaraderie with culturally unrecognizable people from all over the globe.
Every generation for the past century-plus has been told the same thing: The United States exists to save the entire world’s less well-to-do by bringing them here and allowing them to experience the American Dream.
It was an argument made by politicians and members of the media, to be sure, but government schools made sure to “mold young minds” into believing the nonsense as well.
It was actually an easy argument to make, so long as there was not a deep dive into the historical evidence. The Germans, Irish, and Italians had all, more or less, assimilated quickly into American culture. It seemed there really was something in the water, and anyone who could take a sip might become as American as anyone whose family helped found the country.
There is something in the water, to be sure, but it is not a secret sauce — it does not work like that. It only exists because generations of Christian Americans from Anglo-European descent built it, maintained it, and created a highly successful, high-trust society meant to be handed down to their kinfolk.
To the extent that it was to be shared with foreigners, the recipients of such a privilege would have to prove themselves worthy of it, and not just at the outset to gain entry, but in perpetuity as a way to continually prove their worth to the people who allowed them to be there.
“Allowing people to become new citizens is a two way agreement, and the part that everyone leaves out is the existing members of the social compact have a right to decide who they want to admit as citizens,” Glenn Ellmers, Salvatori Research Fellow in the American Founding at the Claremont Institute, told The Federalist. “They can exclude anyone they want for any reason, and that sounds kind of harsh and arbitrary, but that’s social compact, because admitting new citizens is only done on the basis of, ‘Will they add to the common good in the country?’ … becoming an American citizen is not a right.”
Why do so many now not understand that? Why is the United States the repository for all the world’s least successful, often violent, often untrustworthy individuals?
Flashback to August 2017, when former CNN White House correspondent and serial liar Jim Acosta attempted to make the argument that Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” the famous poem on the side of the Statue of Liberty, should be the guiding light of any administration’s immigration policies.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” he quoted to then-White House senior advisor Stephen Miller, arguing against a bill that would change how immigrants get permanent residency, prioritizing those who speak English and have skills.
Miller rightly pointed out that a poem on the Statue of Liberty does not dictate America’s immigration policies, adding, “I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty enlightening the world — is a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. … The poem that you’re referring to was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty.”
Take Acosta’s reputation as a lying tool of the left out of the equation for a moment: The reality is he probably genuinely believes this, because he was told to believe it from a very young age.
The most potent government resource for propaganda is public school. It is a place where children go to “learn,” ostensibly, about a wide variety of things, but perhaps most importantly, American history and civic duty, for the purposes of creating a foundation for stewarding the United States for future generations.
The broader American public, including most conservatives, only started noticing the propaganda relatively recently in the form of transgender or critical race theory being taught to Gen Z students.
But most of those Americans have not questioned the lies that they were told in school.
After all, school didn’t have any of this nonsense. School was patriotic back then. We learned the basics. I know my history.
If you don’t know any better, and you didn’t have attentive parents to challenge the official story, you are susceptible to believing every line of nonsense told to you in history class.
American Indians used every part of the animal, so as to waste nothing. They were deeply connected to the land and the rivers, and would shed tears at the thought of pollution. They smoked peace pipes, and were undeniably peaceful — always — except when aggressed upon by white people from Europe.
As with many Howard Zinn-isms, none of that is true, but that message has been drilled into the heads of every American who went to public school for generations. It has become part of the baseline collective historical knowledge of the American people for so long, that questioning it is a taboo.
Americans are required to believe that European settlers, who are the sole reason there is civilization on these shores in the first place, deeply wronged the American Indians with zero provocation because the ultimate goal is to undermine the American ethos and ethnicity. The “nation of immigrants” line has a similar purpose.
We are a nation of immigrants, Americans are told. The proof is in New York, where the French awarded us for it. Remember always: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
It’s dogmatic for nearly everyone, and for those it is not, it is likely because they made an individual effort to untangle the agitprop.
It is unclear exactly the source of the phrase “a nation of immigrants” as it pertains to the United States. President John F. Kennedy wrote a book with that title when he was a U.S. senator in 1958, and used it to advocate mass immigration (though the scale back then was quite different).
Many years prior in 1874, the phrase was used in an editorial for the Daily State and Journal of Alexandria, a Northern Virginia-based publication that stopped publication the same year.
Shortly thereafter, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, blocking Chinese laborers from coming to the United States for 10 years, while allowing the government to deport those already in the country. Several other immigration statutes followed, while at the same time, Ellis Island — the primary hub of migration into the United States — was opened in 1892.
Even the mass migration allowed by Ellis Island pales in comparison to the kinds of unchecked, rampant, and destructive migration the United States has subjected itself to for the last half-century.
“Propaganda should be recognized as propaganda,” Ellmers said, but even many open borders leftists would admit, at the very least, that “we used to do a much better job of assimilating people, and we don’t do that anymore.”
There was never any reason whatsoever to take in migrants from Somalia, Venezuela, Haiti, Syria, Afghanistan, or any other horrific country whose people would, at best, add nothing to the country, and more often than not, be a massive burden on the American economy and culture, while refusing to assimilate altogether.
“The existing members of the social compact, people who are already citizens, have very, very good reasons for saying, ‘Hold on, we already have way too many people here that we can’t handle, who are not assimilating, who do not demonstrate republican virtue, we have a real problem with the civic health of the country, and so for now, we’re simply going to deny adding any new citizens to the compact until we can figure out our current problems,'” Ellmers said. “That is not only entirely their right, you can even say it’s their duty to prevent any new citizens from coming in until the health of the Republic can be restored and those new citizens can be properly assimilated.”
