What makes someone an American? A question that can sometimes be read as gauzily abstract has been, in the first months of the nation’s 47th presidency, urgently literal. It’s also complicated, not least by something I find beautiful about America. It is a nation that has always seemed to be in a liminal state: an experiment in progress, an incomplete draft, “a country,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.”
Its borders, its compact, even its flag were in a constant mode of revision, and as such, its people are too: a nation of the self-made and the reinventing. A person can “become” an American in a sense that feels more like adoption or religious conversion than it does a change in legal status. In its myth, America is a promise and an invitation that can be laid claim to by birth, but also by creed.
But there is a cruel irony underlying this beauty. That feeling of openness and possibility is not just a product of the noble designs of the founders. It is the product of the country’s bloodiest and most rapacious impulses. Even before its independence, the fledgling nation wanted a constant flow of reinforcements to secure and defend the frontier, both from the competing powers of the Old World and from the Indigenous peoples of the New. Manifest Destiny urged the country to push ever westward, requiring the forcible dispossession and removal of the American Indians who lived in those lands. It also needed settlers to occupy and hold them. And so, as the legal scholar Aziz Rana argues, the nation instituted policies of open entry and easy naturalization, widespread noncitizen voting and free land for settlers, motivated less by a spirit of welcome than by an imperative of geographic and economic expansion.
These policies drove the first great wave of immigration to America, during the frontier era, beckoning first Anglo Protestants, then Northern and Western Europeans more generally. Eventually, especially after the closing of the frontier in 1890, the country needed workers for its industrializing cities and extended its welcome to Southern Europeans, who arrived in a second titanic surge. If America is a nation of immigrants, it is because it was first a nation of conquest and violent displacement.
Every country has its myths, its memory and a set of ideals that shape its terms of belonging. But these abstractions have particular salience in the Americas where, as the political scientist Benedict Anderson observed, national identity was a more deliberate act of invention: Unlike Europe, where nations imagined themselves as ancient, awakening to an identity traced to an ancestral past, those in the New World thought of themselves as being newly born. This is perhaps nowhere more true than in the United States.
These ideas may feel far removed from the practical concerns of politics. After all, it’s not clear what bearing they have on what the tax rate should be or how to fund Medicaid. But national identity matters because it is a precondition for us to make decisions together, especially the hard ones that may require sacrifice. Our self-conception has always been a contested one, the product of conflict rather than consensus. And in the present moment, it feels like Americans are deciding, once again, what kind of nation we will be.
Sixty years after the beginning of the third wave of immigration to these shores, nativist sentiment is rising and the country threatens to narrow American identity. We have been here before, and one way of reading American history is as an ongoing war between progress and reaction — each worldview attempting to confront and defeat the other. But our history suggests that the relationship between exclusion and inclusion is messier and more complicated than that. It also suggests a way out of our present crisis without losing our country’s soul.
In his second term, President Trump has sought to use every tool at his disposal, both legitimate and illegitimate, to fundamentally reorder what it means to be an American. His administration has terminated temporary protections for many migrants, sharply stepped up immigration arrests, increased the rate of asylum denials and invoked a wartime law and unconventional accords to deport migrants. It has also claimed wide latitude to cancel visas and schedule those who held them for deportation based on their political views. Perhaps most jarringly, the administration has sought to use executive power to limit birthright citizenship, denying it to those whose parents were in the United States temporarily or illegally. Last Friday, the Trump administration won a procedural victory on that front when the Supreme Court limited the ability of lower court judges to block the policy nationwide.
Unrestricted birthright citizenship — the characteristically New World notion that being born on a country’s soil is enough to make a person its inheritor and steward — represents American identity at its fullest and most audacious. It reflects a belief that the nation can enfranchise and enlist anyone in our grand experiment of self-governance.
But like the rest of America’s immigration policy, the expansiveness of birthright citizenship belies its origins. It was enshrined in the 14th Amendment as a legal solution to the moral contradiction that resulted from adopting and then abolishing chattel slavery. Emancipation created within our borders a whole people from what just a moment before had been regarded by our laws as property. Who were they to us? We amended the Constitution to decide: By virtue of being born in America, they were fellow citizens; the same would hold true for all who would be born here thereafter.
So just as it is hard to imagine that America would have welcomed immigrants so freely had it been founded in an unpopulated wilderness, it is also difficult to imagine that the country would have enshrined unconditional birthright citizenship in the Constitution had all the people who worked its fields been free.
The provision of birthright citizenship also requires us to answer a difficult question: What should bind together people who inherited citizenship from their from their parents, those who were naturalized into citizenship by a promise and those who received it by virtue of being born on this nation’s soil?
The second great wave of American immigration peaked in 1907, and by 1910, nearly 15 percent of residents were newcomers. Add in the children they had within our borders, and at the turn of the 20th century, immigrant stock — those within a generation of arriving — made up about one-third of America’s population. The weaving of these lives into the national fabric is one of the most important and transformational achievements in our country’s history.
Legend recalls this process as automatic and inevitable, a natural effect of people living near one another, learning from and marrying into one another’s cultures and being pressed into cooperation by simple daily necessity.
These processes did all play a part, but they don’t tell the whole story. The hammering together of an American people out of this European diaspora was seen at the time as an urgent national project. Civic society, business and the government all mobilized to inculcate American culture, language and values. The Y.M.C.A. organized English classes for immigrants. Settlement houses helped them find jobs and enroll their children in schools. The Ford Motor Company held compulsory classes that taught immigrant employees American civics and values. At a pageant, the graduates, dressed in their ethnic garb, would walk into what looked like an enormous melting pot, which their instructors were stirring with oversized ladles, and then walk out waving American flags. The project’s most powerful force was the rapidly expanding public school system, an incubator for national identity in the children of immigrants and natives alike.
We tend to remember this as a uniform effort. In reality, many different agendas were at work, some that sought to protect immigrants from the hardships of life in this country, others that claimed to be protecting this country from the hardship of immigration.
The popular memory of the second wave also tends to understate the extent to which immigrants resisted the campaign to make them Americans. Often clustered together in ethnic enclaves, they created a network of foreign language newspapers, parochial schools and clubs, in part out of necessity, but also in part to preserve their distinctiveness. As the great immigration historian Oscar Handlin documented, many immigrants resented the institutions bent on “improving” them as dehumanizing and patronizing. And the policies of Americanization were not always gentle ones. Laws were passed mandating compulsory school attendance, in part to separate children from the culture of their immigrant parents. Prohibitions against teaching in foreign languages — particularly German — had the same goal.
It’s not surprising, then, that by the 1920s the paternalism of Americanization had fully curdled into an outright nativist, racist and anti-immigrant movement. Ford abandoned the melting pot pageants and started distributing antisemitic propaganda at its dealerships. Representative Charles Stengle of New York argued that the project of Americanization was failing because unlike earlier immigrants, the new arrivals were incapable of assimilation: “The fire has apparently gone out under the melting pot and the original American stock is not absorbing these insoluble elements.”
Representative John Tillman of Arkansas condemned these insoluble masses as having corrupted America: “We have admitted the dregs of Europe until America has been Orientalized, Europeanized, Africanized, and mongrelized to that insidious degree that our genius, stability and greatness, and promise of advancement and achievement, are actually menaced.”
This movement eventually led to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, which slashed immigration overall and instituted nation-by-nation quotas that were based on America’s demographics in 1890 — strongly favoring the fair-skinned, Protestant residents of Western and Northern Europe. In an opinion piece in this newspaper, headlined “America of the Melting Pot Comes to End,” Senator David A. Reed of Pennsylvania, one of the sponsors of the bill, announced that the country would no longer indulge the idea that immigrants could be “fused by the ‘melting pot’ into a distinctive American type.” But it was not the end of the melting pot. It was the beginning.
As historians and economists have argued, the long years of low immigration that followed the act eased white interethnic tensions, clearing the way for the emergence of unhyphenated American identity. Institutions like parochial schools, established as bulwarks against assimilation, often became engines of it. Ethnic enclaves shrank as their upwardly mobile children moved elsewhere and few new arrivals came to replace them. But the immigrants of the second wave didn’t just blend in to an American mainstream, as some nativists had hoped. They enriched it. The 1924 law, motivated by the idea that those immigrants could not become a part of the American fabric, ended up knitting them more tightly into it. The resulting common culture was the ground from which the New Deal consensus could emerge. The solidarity forged in World War II completed the consolidation of this new America.
In 1958, Senator John F. Kennedy looked back on the nation’s history, marked with extermination, exclusion and suppression — more than three decades into an era of restrictive immigration policy — and called America a “nation of immigrants.” And it was in this America that it was possible to win the formal extension of America’s promises — first to Black Americans, with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and then to nonwhite immigrants, with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. America’s most capacious ideal was expanded, then, partially as a product of the nativism that feared it.
In the aftermath of a war against fascism, the racist eugenicism of the 1924 act was an embarrassing echo of the enemy America had helped defeat; in an ideological struggle against Communism, it was a liability. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act dropped the country quotas that favored Western and Northern Europeans and made it easier for U.S. citizens to bring their relatives from abroad. The act inaugurated America’s third great wave of immigration, which was drawn heavily from nonwhite countries such as Mexico and China. As some of its skeptics correctly anticipated, the bill reshaped the country’s demographics.
Today, America is home to more immigrants than any other country. In fact, there are more immigrants here than in the next four leading countries combined. In 2024, the United States accounted for 4 percent of the world’s population, but 17 percent of all international migrants lived here, a portion of whom were undocumented. And the fraction of America’s population that is foreign born is once again about 15 percent. Just as it did 115 years ago, this inspires anxieties about American identity. At the core of Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is a nostalgia for the America that existed before the law was passed. And to many of his followers, this nostalgia promotes a belief not just in the superiority of American culture — a polyglot, provisional culture nevertheless grounded in that of the Anglo Protestant founders — but in the idea that only certain kinds of people, from certain kinds of traditions or nations, can adopt this culture. In this vision, America is not a creed at all. It’s a lineage.
This idea has once again risen in prominence on the right, and is exemplified by the growing political prominence of the term “Heritage American,” meant to denote those who can trace their roots here back several generations. Some conservatives use the phrase to imply that a person’s Americanness is strengthened by the tenure of their ancestors. Other people use it to launder white nationalism with facially neutral language. Either way, in this reckoning, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act brought on what now feels like an identity crisis.
Like the immigrants of the now century-old second wave, those of the third great wave are brave, enterprising and industrious, almost by definition, having overcome tremendous obstacles for a chance to be Americans.
This is one reason that, as the economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan have demonstrated, despite sharp differences among their origins, third-wave immigrants and their descendants move up the economic ladder at a rate similar to those of the second wave. And though debates over immigration are often framed in terms of a zero-sum competition between immigrants and native workers, there’s little evidence that immigrants are economically hurting natives in the long run.
Contemporary nativists often suggest that while the European immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were able to become Americans, the post-1965 generation of largely nonwhite immigrants is too culturally different to do so. Of course, these are precisely the same arguments that nativists made about those European immigrants when comparing them to those that had preceded them. The nativists are equally incorrect this time around.
But it is true that replicating the binding together of the nation faces new challenges. For instance: A loose collection of Europeans turned themselves into white Americans in part by defining themselves against those who were not, especially Black Americans. Can we arrive at an American “we” without a “them” to marginalize?
And integration into America doesn’t work the same way it once did. The global dominance of American culture and commerce has made it easier than ever for immigrants to acculturate. Even before they arrive, they can watch us hash out our values on X, learn our jokes and dance moves from TikTok and read our newspapers online. They can even shop our latest clothing trends. But that same world has removed some of the pressures that encourage them to do so. Thanks to the internet and social media, immigrants can make it in America without entirely leaving their past, because their homeland is never more than a touch screen away. They can maintain their old relationships, consume their old media and keep contact with their old neighborhoods, living in two worlds and neither at the same time. There is some evidence that this could be slowing down assimilation. Ethnic enclaves can be almost as all-encompassing when they are digital as when they are geographic.
Fuzzier but no less real are the changes in the posture of Americans toward their own cultural identity. Immigrants still do want to become Americans, but they are assimilating into a national identity that is fractured, adversarial and uncertain. And at almost the same time that America extended its promise to nonwhites in the 1960s, it began to abandon the goal of unity out of plurality. The idea that there are certain values or principles that immigrants and natives alike should adopt as Americans has eroded: To some parts of the right, our ideals are ancillary to the concreteness of ancestry; in some parts of the left, they are a bad joke, an obstacle to equity.
The world has changed, so the way that we think about what it means to become American must too. But one thing remains the same: A cohesive and inclusive American identity won’t just create itself. It must be forged. And it’s a project that we must all participate in, adapting the successes and avoiding the missteps of the past.
It’s a serious task that calls for sweeping solutions. A sharp across-the-board reduction in legal immigration — paired with a generous amnesty program for those undocumented and unauthorized immigrants who are established in America — might help America regain its balance and compose a new harmony out of its profuse cacophony.
But that alone is likely to be insufficient. The English writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton, after visiting the States in 1921, said that Americans had styled themselves a “nation with the soul of a church.” In 1956, Horace Kallen, the father of cultural pluralism, went even further, writing that “the American Idea is, literally, religion.” If one can inherit a creed, then it is in the same way one is inculcated into a faith. It requires a practice. A mandatory national service program, in which 18-year-olds work shoulder to shoulder with Americans from different backgrounds, could serve that purpose, just as mandatory military service did in World War II.
These suggestions are thorny, and have difficulties of their own. An immigration pause would need exceptions to respect international asylum law, for instance, and if America is going to prevent disadvantaged people from improving their lives by immigrating here, it has a moral duty to help them where they are. Mandatory national service would be both socially and economically disruptive. It may also be the case that Americans have no appetite to pursue these options, even if they were guaranteed to work.
But an American identity that can unite us all is worth fighting for. Our country has urgent problems and solving them requires the civic solidarity that thinking of ourselves as Americans helps to create. The historian Richard Slotkin has observed that a workable American identity must join both the descendants of the Indigenous and those who dispossessed them, the line of the enslaved and those who possessed them, those who can trace their lineage beyond the Revolution and the newly arrived, the natural-born and the naturalized; a teeming profusion of races, cultures, classes and religions. It is a challenge and a burden. It is also, though, a blessed inheritance.
Ezekiel Kweku is a special projects editor at Times Opinion and a first-generation American.
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