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.
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September 6th, 2006 at 7:51 am
jlbarnard
I think you’re engaging here in a kind of semantic nostalgia. You’re right to point out the contradictions in terms — but such contradictions might be seen as an inevitable development, and one that can have positive descriptive effects. The U.S.A. is, in many ways, a nation of contradictions, and labelling it so is not necessarily a problem. What is a problem, in my view, is the use to which such labels are put. The phrase “A Nation of Immigrants” might be used to highlight the differences among us, to advocate a less tribal, less reductive stance towards others (both internally and externally). Instead, as you note, this phrase is used to the opposite effect — to pretend that there is indeed some common or tribal bond after all, that the anglo-saxon and otherwise north-western Europeans (immigrants only via “granddad”) have some “blood and soil” (so sayeth Buchanan) connection, not only to one another, but to all other immigrants from all other countires, that surely does not exist. And this is all, of course, bullshit, and is meant to create the conditions, probably through assimilation and loss of cultural difference and identity, favorable to a certain set of policies. Why should we expect a first generation Nigerian, or Yemeni, or, for that matter, a Mexican, to assume some sort of identity with, say, Barbara Bush, simply because they like to say it is so?
It’s worth thinking about the other contradiction you mention: “a constitution of amendments.” Surely, from a rigid semantic perspective, this is a strange formulation. But, the fact is that this is what we have. The process of amendment was, indeed, written right into the constituting document. Here is a relevant passage from Jay Grossman’s “Reconstituting the American Renaissance”:
“The adoption of the first ten amendments to address the Philadelphia document’s ambiguity—or plain silence—on matters of individual liberties deemed by some too important for guesswork establishes the Constitution’s peculiar status as a constituting text that “ambiguously affirms its own transgression…its writing is a rewriting, and its final truth that its truth is not immutable but always open to modification and never final.” Indeed the promise of amendment at the time of ratification was not initially mere afterthought, as the term improperly suggests, but was instead the very condition of Constitutional enactment and ratification” (3).
Creating a “consitution of amendments” or a “nation of immigrants” is only a transgression against language if we are insisting on language being static, rather than in flux, somewhat arbitrary, and always created and altered by those who need to use it. It seems that there are two options: either embrace necessary contradictions and acclimate ourselves to a language that admits these kinds of paradoxes, or we must invent new words. How else to describe a place like America in less than a thousand words? We could invent a word, and call it a Widget, but that would be just as arbitrary, and would have even less “meaning” than the contradictory phrases we use now.