The phrase “nation of immigrants” is surely one of the strangest phrases, and also one of the most ingenious rhetorical dodges, ever invented.  A nation is, literally from the Latin natio, a tribe or a people, and natio is the same word for birth, which implies that this is a tribe or people bound, as tribes normally are, by kinship.  Now it is possible for someone from outside a tribe to be adopted into it, but it is a contradiction in terms to speak of a “nation of immigrants,” unless one is describing an entire people that picked up and went to another country, since these immigrants have typically been overwhelmingly unrelated by kinship or, in many cases, even by ethnicity to the people that was already here.  To be a “nation of immigrants,” being an immigrant would have to be the defining feature of everyone in the nation.  Whatever may have been true about great-granddad is not true of you, which means that you and most everyone around you are not part of any “nation of immigrants,” but of an American nation.   The ancient Israelites were perhaps such a “nation of immigrants,” but there are few other obvious examples. 

The phrase is distinctly odd, since no nation today can correctly claim to be such a thing, as every people has been settled in more or less the same country for ages.  There are nations that have had a history of periodic large-scale immigration, and this is usually what is meant by the deceptive phrase “nation of immigrants,” though it has long been the case for most of the history of this country the immigrants were not constituting the nation but instead joined themselves, more or less, to the people that was already here.  If we spoke of a “nation of immigrants,” we might as well also speak of a “tradition of innovations” or a “constitution of amendments.” 

But the reason why it is ingenious is that it forcibly identifies everyone in the debate–or at least everyone who concedes the use of the phrase–with the current immigrants.  If we are a nation of immigrants, this means that we are all immigrants, which ultimately means that we have no more right to this place than the new immigrants do, which is a manifest lie.  We do have more right to it, and will have at least until such time as we have been driven off the land, and perhaps our better claim will not cease even then. 

Most peoples throughout history have created myths of heroic ancestors who first settled in a land and gave their name to it; most peoples will construct elaborate mythologies to establish their timeless claims to a piece of land.  With this preposterous rhetoric of being a “nation of immigrants” (who is responsible for this travesty of language?), Americans are among the few nations in the world who pride themselves on not being from the land that they live in and making no attempt to pretend otherwise.  That may have seemed clever when it allowed Americans to mock the Old World’s decrepitude and the New World’s possibilities, but now this attitude seems like a recipe for the eventual displacement of the nation and its recreation as something all together different.  Oh, granted, our grandchildren probably won’t see the final effects of that displacement, but if current trends continue they will see a large part of it.  It seems to me that no one can really look on with equanimity at the prospect of the gradual displacement of the peoples who fashioned this country–he is either dispirited at the prospect, or enthusiastic and chooses his policy options accordingly.