NOT A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS ONLY
The U.S. Settler/Immigrant Distinction
And why we don’t talk about it
“Everyone in the United States who isn’t Native American [or the descendent of enslaved people] is an immigrant!”
I hear this idea constantly.
It’s more or less the standard line from left-liberals — although not leftists — in the U.S.
Everyone in the U.S. who isn’t Native American or who doesn’t have ancestors who were brought to this continent enslaved came from people who chose to come to the US from elsewhere. So, most Americans are now in the same category — immigrants. As such, everyone in that group should see themselves as equal.
That’s the liberal idea, anyway.
But that’s not the social reality in the U.S., and never has been. If it was the social reality and everyone acknowledged it, Trumpism would not and could not exist.
Just like the second Ku Klux Klan wouldn’t have existed. Or the Know-Nothings of the 1850s. Or Ben Franklin’s mild resentment of German speakers in 18th-century Pennsylvania.
So what’s the actual social reality in the U.S.? Why don’t we admit it?
Other than the two specific groups mentioned, everyone in the U.S. is an emigrant or the descendant of an emigrant. This means most people in the US descend from people who chose to leave some other country (although for indentured servants or convicts, it wasn’t the freest choice) or are people who made that choice themselves.
The complication comes in at this point, though, because once these emigrants arrived in North America, some had the option of becoming settlers.
That’s what happened with my own ancestors. Some, in the 17th century, came from England to colonial Massachusetts and Virginia. Some were Irish Catholics fleeing the famine of the late 1840s. But both groups had the ability to come to northern California and get land. Emigrants became settlers. For millions upon millions of white Americans, “my family settled here” is where they start the story.
That’s the key to the social (cultural, political) conflict in the U.S. right now. Settler is a different social (cultural, political) category in the U.S., one that comes with specific ideas of righteousness, ownership, and power.
To be clear, from what I have read, many indigenous Americans consider all non-indigenous and non-enslaved-descended people in North America to be settlers. On the Cultural Left and within U.S. and international academia, the U.S. is routinely described as a settler colonial entity.
If U.S. society as a whole took that view, and along with it took up a correspondingly expansive humility about the majority’s relationship to their presence on this land, we would all be better off.
That’s not where we are, however.
What I mean by settlers, then, are the emigrants to the U.S. who arrived in this country as it was forming in the colonial period or after independence but before urbanization. These people then went into the countryside and had access to, if not always the reality of, land ownership.
In the periods we’re looking at, many of these people would have been called colonials and then pioneers.
Others, especially in the South, would have been called either white trash or planters, depending on their class.
As the 19th century ended and the 20th century began with a significant wave of emigration from Italy (especially Sicily), the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, Greece, and the late Ottoman Levant, these pioneers, white trash, and planters began to be considered and called old stock.
Eventually, most of these groups were assimilated into an expanding idea of whiteness. But, as one nativist on Twitter reminded us, there is still resistance to seeing non-settlers as equal partners in the American project, no matter where they came from:
Just because you have a piece of paper saying that you’re an American doesn’t mean that you have an equal claim to this country as those who can trace their ancestry on this land back to before the government that gave you that paper.
The nativist went on to tie his identity in his state to the act of settlement of one of his ancestors at the turn of the 18th century.
Is “actually you’re an immigrant too! :) :)” really anything other than a non-sequitur in response to this sort of assertion of social power?
Because this statement is the kind of social power that defines settler identity and sets it apart from the identity of those who maintain a sense of connection to their family’s history of migration. (Let alone those from enslaved ancestors in North America or those who are members of the first nations of the continent.)
These nativist statements are supported, still, by not-that-distant work from popular historians. The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West by David McCullough was published in 2019.
In the name of identity
Historical facts could tell us all sorts of things, but our identities come from the combination of how we are seen and how we see ourselves. Settlers have an identity in the U.S. built on more social power than immigrants have. Settlers would not want to accept the idea that they also come from emigrants from elsewhere. That’s why they start their stories at the point that they do.
It is social power to say “I was here first”, but of course, the white settler nativist has to combine that with the aggression that allowed his ancestors to conquer as well as the narcissism that makes him leave out the obvious. It is righteousness to believe descent and its supposed claims matter most of all and that the people who agree are the only ones who matter.
The identity’s core is ownership of land, buildings, (in the beginning) people, and narratives.
Those who socially identify and are identified solely as immigrants and immigrant descendants lack this ownership, even as liberals repeat the mantra “the U.S. is a nation of immigrants”.
Being a nation of (mostly) emigrants would be more accurate. Yet it would require changes in the stories we tell, the identities the settlers have, and the power we give to various groups.
It would require changing what we teach our kids. As folks may have noticed, that’s already contentious now.
Where is that contention coming from? Settlers, mostly.
Better not to talk about it, in the face of that power.
Yet how does the country hold together if we don’t?
A square deal
So, out with “a nation of immigrants”. What narrative framework should replace it, though? Actual history is, of course, complex. No narrative can capture every individual, family, or community’s experience fully.
But we can still do better than pretending either that settlers don’t exist or that they were heroic and more legitimate than the other social groups in the U.S.
The way to do that is a four-sided story. Four groups have distinct social identities in contemporary America. Subcategories exist, but overall there are:
1) Indigenous North American nations
2) Descendants of Black freedmen
3) Settlers (mostly Northwest-Euro-American and Hispanic-American)
4) Immigrants (those who identify themselves, their family members, or their ancestors as such, from countries across the globe)
Settler identity and power have come from violent conflict with the other three groups. Settler power is based on the exclusion and delegitimizing of the other three groups. Settler narratives seek to push the other groups aside now. Most Americans are emigrants, but settlers have had a position of brutally “earned” power. Their descendants may use it to be nativists.
We should say so. We should teach so.
We shouldn’t pretend that a happy inaccurate story will erase the narrative of settler power.
How different the U.S. would be if liberals stopped being the party of Pollyanna and instead spoke the truth.
