Americanism as an Immigration Policy

I f America is an idea, rather than a people, does that mean we should welcome into the country people who don’t share the idea?

There’s a long-standing and probably never-ending debate on the right about whether America is fundamentally a people or an idea. Are we a unique “propositional nation,” founded on a creed, or does our creed flow from our people and their ways? To some extent, as I’ve argued before, this is a fight between two strawmen: We are obviously both. But while the roots of the American idea had to come from a specific people and their particular Western, Christian, Anglo-Saxon heritage, I incline more toward the view of the nation they made as an idea with a people than as a people with an idea.

America today is nothing close to an exclusively white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation, yet we have not unraveled, and we continue to prosper. It is our culture and our creed — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the whole classical liberal ethos of the Founding — that binds us even where our blood and our soil alone are too varied to do the job. Of course, “culture” is something claimed by both the “we’re a people” and the “we’re an idea” crowds. I would submit that it lies at the intersection of the two, but American culture is deeply intertwined with our political and economic ideas about our way of life: personal liberty, property ownership, economic opportunity, social and legal equality, geographic and class mobility, self-reliance, self-defense, personal and home privacy, free speech, religious pluralism, the idea that the government works for us and not we for them, and all the rest. When people say, “This is America,” they are often using that as a shorthand for those ideas, and when they call a person or an argument “un-American,” that is shorthand for its opposite.

The most famous exponent of that argument was Abraham Lincoln, who led the nation through the sternest test of whether we would unravel due to our differences. Lincoln grounded our founding firmly in an idea in the Gettysburg Address: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” In 1858, Lincoln argued that the American idea was what held together such a diverse nation with so many people whose ancestors were not here in 1776, let alone in 1607 or 1620:

If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none . . . but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence . . . then they feel that that moral sentiment . . . and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration. . . . That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together.

The people-versus-idea view of the country has some obvious implications for immigration policy — but also some underexplored ones. If you think principally in terms of blood and soil — and more broadly, in terms of shared history and shared common culture — then certain conclusions follow. One is that immigration should be disfavored and at least restricted, both because it imports people not of our blood or our bonds of history and because it takes generations to truly assimilate to our national culture. A second is that, to the extent we allow immigration, it should seek to keep stable the mix of people we already have. The logic of this approach was reflected in our immigration policy between 1924 and 1965, in which we had not only limits to immigration but also national origin quotas that aimed at having newcomers retain the same mix of national and ethnic backgrounds as the existing population.

The racial thinking embedded in this argument is inescapable. Any serious effort at recreating it today would require making the racial element explicit. If we want to restore the proportion of immigrants from England to reflect our English heritage, we swiftly run up against the question of who lives in England today — by no means only Englishmen. If your policy aspires to recreate the immigration from England to America in the 18th century, you’re not going to get there by welcoming Londoners of Pakistani extraction. You won’t keep the Swedish element of Minnesota’s culture by importing people from Stockholm whose parents came there from Mogadishu. The quiet part in this argument cannot be kept quiet if it is actually to be implemented.

That much is already fairly well-known. But those who argue instead for America as a propositional nation too often fail to follow the logic of their own position. If our ideas are what keep the country from dissolving, then it ought to follow that we should let into the country only those people who embrace those ideas and keep out those who reject them.

If this country is primarily an idea, then anyone can become an American — but not everyone can become an American. You have to buy into the idea. And, if you take seriously the integration of our ideas into our culture, then you still come back to the need for new arrivals to assimilate gradually over time into that culture. That conclusion argues against unlimited mass immigration and in favor of other assimilationist policies aimed at getting new immigrants to learn the language, immerse themselves in the common culture rather than live solely in old-soil ethnic enclaves, and crucially, to be instructed by our educational system to love America and embrace its founding ideas. Ronald Reagan, who embraced Lincoln’s view of America as a propositional nation, also warned that we would not survive without handing down to each generation an “informed patriotism” that loved both our ideas and the history of how they grew and were defended.

Of course, there are inherent practical challenges in taking the philosophy of Americanism as the touchstone of immigration policy and turning it into a practical system of regulation. If anything, screening immigrants for American ideas is more difficult and intrusive than screening them for national or ethnic origin. Surely, at a minimum, it involves at least occasionally kicking non-citizens out of the country when they plainly take sides against the nation and its fundamental values. That sort of thing may sit uncomfortably with our free-speech ideals, but those ideals will not long endure if we don’t have a people who share them. Accepting that the American nation needs its ideas to survive requires us to bestir ourselves to ensure that those ideas shall not perish from this earth.