Posted on 10/09/2015 9:33:01 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
Generations of students have been taught that we are a nation of immigrants but inquiring minds beg to differ. Well, actually, they don’t beg.
“What we have never been is a nation of immigrants,” veteran journalist Ralph Kinney Bennett said last weekend at the regional meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Indianapolis. “We were put through the process, rough-edged though it may have been, to become Americans.”
“We did not suggest that they shed their heritage but make it part of a larger heritage.” Bennett retired as senior editor in the Washington bureau of Reader’s Digest in 2001.
William B. Allen, a professor emeritus at Michigan State University said in remarks the previous evening at the conference that “There is a vague intuitive geographic U. S. identity that we are a nation of immigrants as if to imply that immigrants remain immigrants and never become Americans.”
“Our diversities do not constitute a national character.”
Christopher Burkett of the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University said in a panel that preceded Bennett’s luncheon address, “Benjamin Franklin urged immigrants not to come to America if they had nothing to recommend them but their birth in Europe, that in the United States, people do not ask where you were born but what you can do.”
“You cannot be a Frenchman in the truest sense of the word without being born there but you can become an American,” Brandon McGinley of the Pennsylvania Family Institute pointed out in another panel. “Putting aside his communism, I think of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This land is your land,’ the idea that just by participating in America you become an American.”
Herman Belz, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland pointed out that “The idea of an American nation took root in the 19th Century and was contested in the 19th Century.”
“In the century following the Civil War, the idea of American nationalism flourished. From the 1960’s on we had racial identities and multiculturalism.”
“Before that, immigrants were accepted into America on those terms [of small r republican government] and assimilated.”
The Philadelphia Society is a group of conservative intellectuals that was formed in the wake of the Goldwater defeat in 1964.
No.
The United States is a nation of citizens governed by the rule of law.
‘The United States is a nation of citizens governed by the rule of law’
And bound it their hearts by the Golden Rule, without which the former rule is quite moot.
Why ruin a perfectly good canard?
How are our rulers supposed to stiff-arm critics of our insane immigration policy now?
Soon to be a nation of islamists.
To apply that to America, no one who comes to America and looks back to where they came is fit to call themselves an American.
Anyone who hyphenates their American Status is not fit to be called an American.
E Pluribus UNUM.
Not E Pluribus Diversitum.
Talking with my teen kids this morning started with Columbus Day, my daughter asked what ended the Indians way of life, I told her it was the white farmers from Europe and there was really no way our country could be a nation of hunters and gatherers she agreed, when I told her history will repeat it self and it will come to pass in their generation that like those Indians the white Christian Americans will soon be displaced by ill-eagle immigrants and Sharia law, she said, you should hear your self.
Nation of Immigrants?
Gezzz, they’ve gang banged and beat that term to death.
Do we want a country of half a billion?
How about a billion? Maybe 5 billion?
Would that be enough for those who want America destroyed?
No, and I know Glenn Schmeck and his freakish audience would like to think so with soccer balls for parasitic obese drug pushers, but not this conservative.
That’s the kids, so often despised on this forum, telling us we’re a holes for our defeatist attitude
They need inspiration. Just give it to them
It’s not for instance logical to compare us whose forefathers did so much with this place you say we took from savages to those savages your words not mine
Let’s put the mind altering substances away and fix this stuation. And get the kids on board
We can’t do that if we say we agree that we are no better than savages
The Indians by the way we’re not mowed down by white farmers.
“we are a nation of immigrants”
That’s a common refrain among the neoconservative faction who stridently insist that America is a “proposition nation”. Michael Medved for example.
It goes hand in hand with their support for amnesty and mass third world immigration.
That party line serves to diminish the people whose ancestors created the country.
Every nation began as immigrants. Stupid argument.
Did I say savages, did I say the farmers mowed them down, did I say we are no better than savages - you really should not attribute your words to me. Are you saying we did not take over this land from the indians?
But the origins of the concept of America, as an ethnic people, derived not in the immigrants who came later, but in the development of new communities by settlers who defined & perpetuated their own culture, eventually breaking away from their old world roots, when the existing Government had infringed on the implied social contract with those settlers.
America was born in what was a Counter-Revolution against outside control, which had become more meddlesome & foreign after the French & Indian War.
Failing to recognize the essentially American character that emerged from the interactive experience of those settlers, in an effort to make those descended from later arrivals--such as myself--feel good, is really to play into the hands of those internationalists, who would like to make believe that everyone is interchangeable, in order to suppress all the things which make any nation unique.
It also plays into the hands of those who want to continue to flood our lands with immigrants who do not share the cultural values, which once distinguished both the original American settlers, and later arrivers, who were drawn here by the appeal of those values.
As the son of immigrant parents from Russia I have often had to make the case to people that I was a US person by birth and by service. My brother was killed on Okinawa in WWII and I served on Leyte. I received a BS in Engineering from the most renowned public university. At one time I applied for a position with a then very important/strategic defense company. In one of my interviews I was questioned as to my loyalty to the US. The interviewer even asked if I or any member of my family had relatives in Russia and if so were there contacts still going on. I honestly answered that my mother was in touch with my deceased father’s brother. The interviewer shook his head as if that was a no-no. However I did end up getting hired and had a very successful career with the company. I very much agree with the proposition that to be a true US citizen one must be centered like my mother and brother and I were. I doubt that 5% of immigrants today be they from Asia, Far East or south of the Texas/Arizona border can vouch for such.
If we we are a nation of immigrants, we are a nation of LEGAL immigrants.
Illegals are not part of America, they are criminal invaders.
We are a nation of morons who voted for Barry twice.
I can’t argue with that. Perhaps I should clarify my point a bit. My comment was more toward those that say we are a nation of immigrants. IMO, it’s a weak argument based on what I posted earlier.
You should read what you wrote
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