A dialogue about immigration and American identity
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| Hi everyone. I recently had a discussion about immigration and American identity for IM-1776. Please read it, share it, let me know what you think in the comments! Excerpt: The definition of an American has been a moving target at least since Irish and German immigrants began arriving en masse in the mid-19th century. These former English colonies woke up one day in the 1850s and discovered that there were non-English majorities in many of their big cities. Ethnogenesis was required if America was ever going to be a people, rather than merely a state. The Naturalization Act of 1798, which offered citizenship to free white men “of good moral character,” is remembered today as an example of nativist exclusivity, but not so at the time. If a late 18th-century European country had offered the full rights and privileges of citizenship to any European of good moral character, we would view it appropriately as an act of revolutionary openness. The idea that the law was primarily intended as a restriction against non-whites is pure revisionism. In its earliest days, America was radically redefining European concepts of citizenship and national belonging… A healthy society is one in which local identities are nested within larger, more inclusive identities, with each identity nourished by those it contains and in which it is contained. A person’s primary loyalty should lie with his family and friends, and next with the family and friends of those in his primary group, and so on. When loyalties are structured this way, the local community is not an abstraction, but the sum of those primary relationships. The concentric circles of affection and loyalty continue to grow and become more distant until they include states, nations, perhaps even broader cultures and international alliances, but these things only hang together organically as long as the root remains strong. Each larger nested identity is valued because it nurtures and sustains the ones it contains. When family and friends are no longer one’s primary locus of identity, there is no longer any organic basis for one’s loyalty to a community. Now, the community, the state, the nation, and the people are reduced to mere abstractions, loyalty to which can only be sustained by fear, force, or ideological enthusiasm.
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