On March 24, hundreds marched in the streets of El Paso, Tex., in honor of an El Salvadoran man while also celebrating a Mexican girl, a Jewish man from Palestine and a migrant to Ireland. The March and Vigil to Stand with Migrants—honoring San Romero, Our Lady of Guadalupe, St. Jude and St. Patrick—was led by bishops from three different countries and advocated for migrants from all over the world.
The event no doubt outraged some “America Firsters”; these hordes certainly looked like they were putting other countries first. But their march was not all that different from those featuring tens of thousands of immigrants and descendants of immigrants marching with Irish flags on St. Patrick’s Day just a week before. Both parades are proudly American events because they celebrate coming here from somewhere else—and loving this country because we are not originally from here.
Current debates about immigration sometimes fall into a strange binary. The pro-immigration crowd doesn’t love America, we are told, and the anti-immigration side does. For example, in a series of posts on X and in interviews, Vice President JD Vance grounded his opposition to immigrants in his love of country: We ought to prioritize us over them, he argued.
But welcoming refugees fleeing from Marxist Venezuela or oppressed Christians from Iran is often done out of a broadening of our love toward non-Americans. This is both good and deeply American. And support for immigrants is also about love for this country. Welcoming immigrants is not about putting other countries first, but rather putting our country first. Supporting immigrants in this country is about American greatness because American greatness has always depended on immigration.
Who could look at anti-immigration movements of the past and think, “Boy, I wish they had succeeded”? Anti-German sentiment grounded repeated attempts to keep Germans out, especially in the 1790s. What would our country be without the Roeblings who designed the Brooklyn Bridge or Charles Schulz who gave us Linus, Snoopy and Charlie Brown? Villanova University, where I teach, is in the suburbs of Philadelphia in part because of anti-Irish protests in the 1840s. Do we really want an America without 30 million descendants of Ireland? Alas, many Irish tried to stop Italian immigration in the 1890s.
While the arrival of Africans to this country has a different and malignant history, I cannot imagine America without their contributions either. And do we want an America without Italian-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Mexican-Americans or that doubly hyphenated group I grew up around in New Hampshire—French-Canadian-Americans?
To love America is to love that it is a nation of immigrants. Andrew Day, in an article defending President Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship, gets one thing right. The debate over immigration is a debate about what it means to be American. Mr. Day’s argument is effectively against American exceptionalism. We are, for him, an ethnic and linguistic nation like any other and so he rejects the claim that “America is an ‘idea.’” For Mr. Day, the United States is really a “pre-political nation, united by a common culture and connected to a common past.” Citizenship should only be for children of citizens; the only people who get to be Americans are, well, Americans. This is one of the least American ideas that I can think of.
We are united by certain ideals. We hold these ideals to be self-evident and believe in the American project of ordered liberty and constitutional governance. The world is full of ethnic polities; I love America for being a polity centered on a shared project of being “we the people.”
Nevertheless, Mr. Day is right that America is a pre-political community grounded in a common culture and past. What he, and the Trump movement, get wrong is that this pre-political reality is that we are not from here, that we are a hyphenated people, that American cuisine is pizza, General Tsao’s chicken, tacos and frankfurters. To love America is not to love the fantasy of a non-immigrant nation, but to love the reality that new people have been showing up for 200 hundred-plus years and will keep showing up. The United States, like the Statue of Liberty, is the “Mother of Exiles,” and “from her beacon-hand/ Glows world-wide welcome.” Every movement that tried to stop that welcome has been proven wrong by how great it is to have had Koreans, Swedes and Portuguese come here in the past and Ukrainians, Nigerians and Vietnamese people come here in the present.
I suspect some readers are now banging the table and claiming that back then, immigrants Americanized, whereas now they refuse to do so. Tell that to my wife, a daughter of a Venezuelan immigrant. Or my Haitian neighbors across the street. Pennsylvanians worried the Germans would not learn English in the 1790s. Some of us worry about the same thing today. We were wrong then, and we are wrong now. The work of assimilation takes time, but it is still happening.
The assimilation of immigrants benefits the American economy, bringing new workers and new dynamism. This might affect housing costs, but those are primarily being driven by insufficient inventory caused by zoning laws, costs of material and labor shortages (which immigrants relieve). The evidence that immigrants might exert downward pressure on lower-income people is oddly not being taken as an argument to increase the minimum wage or support unions. Certainly, immigrants who commit crimes should be deported. but immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than American citizens.
Open borders are a terrible idea; creating a functional legal process for immigrants and refugees is a great idea. But when I hear people proclaim that they only want immigrants who wait in line the legal way, I cannot help but think that does not sound very American. Do we want people here who are willing to walk 2,000 miles, doing everything they can for a new and better life, or people who wait in line for years while their prospects stagnate? The former sound like the people who are going to make the country greater rather than more bureaucratic. Find a way to get the intrepid here in a legal way, sure—but spare me the appeal to red-taping people to death.
For the whole of American history, Americans have been coming here from all over, whether they came freely or were forced, were fleeing from something or rushing toward something, whether they applied from abroad or walked across a continent without papers or sailed across the sea as a stowaway. They have been coming and becoming Americans. That is what America is and that is worth conserving, promoting and loving.
