Immigration and Independence Day By Jacob Laksin

It is among the odder ironies of modern political life that the Fourth of July, a holiday set aside to celebrate American exceptionalism, has become an occasion to proclaim multicultural pieties.

For a vivid demonstration of this tendency, look no further than the habit of our high-minded commentators to lecture every Independence Day that “we are a nation of immigrants.” In in its most extreme incarnation, this claim holds not only that America has been “a nation of immigrants from its very inception” – an observation equal parts true and misleading – but that any reflection on the American character that fails to pay proper homage to immigration is itself a kind of intellectual treason. Historian Oscar Handlin, aptly summing up the view, has written that “immigrants were American history.”

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