Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - Not A Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

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ADVANCE PRAISE

With characteristic grit and brio, Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrates how profoundly the settler-colonial history of the United States and the ideology of white nativism have shaped both immigration policy and immigrant identity.

MIKE DAVIS,
author of Prisoners of the American Dream

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has produced a remarkable, engrossing, and readable reexamination of US history.

BILL FLETCHER JR.,
trade unionist and author of
Theyre Bankrupting Us!
And Twenty Other Myths About Unions

In this book, a precious gift drawn from an amazingly rich life and a prodigious life of learning, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz urges us to disavow the violence of the US settler nation-state, its discursive erasures of native peoples and its material relations of dispossession.

GARY Y. OKIHIRO,
author of Third World Studies:
Theorizing Liberation

This is a must-read to finally discard unquestioning settler American liberalism and patriotism.

HARSHA WALIA,
author of Border and Rule: Global Migration,
Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz methodically unravels the pernicious myth of a nation of immigrants, standing in the way of collective well-being on this continent and beyond.

MANU KARUKA,
author of Empires Tracks: Indigenous Nations,
Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad

Once again, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrates why she is one of the foremost historical scholars we have today, and Not A Nation of Immigrants is her most crucial offering yet, opening new insights on this countrys sordid history of systemic oppression, exclusion, and erasure.

TIM Z. HERNANDEZ,
author of All They Will Call You

Simply put, if you read this book and learn its lessons, you will have to change everything you think about the history of the United States and the terms we use to fight for justice.

WALTER JOHNSON,
author of The Broken Heart of America:
St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States

From being deeply shaken and disturbed, to ultimately feeling exhilarated and optimistic by Dunbar-Ortizs conclusion and call to arms, this is a paradigm-shifting work.

PATRICK HIGGINS,
anti-imperialist historian and activist

You will never look at US history the same way after reading Not A Nation of Immigrants .

AVIVA CHOMSKY,
author of Undocumented:
How Immigration Became Illegal

In memory of Ramn Casiano

19161931

So, if ever built, what will the United States Native American Genocide Memorial Museum contain? What will it exhibit?

It will be one room, a fifty-foot square with the same large photo filling the walls, ceiling, and floor.

There will only be one visitor allowed at any one time.

There will be no furniture.

That one visitor will have to stand or sit on the floor.

Or lie on the floor if they feel the need.

That visitor must remain in that room for one hour.

There will be no music.

The only soundtrack will be random gunshots from rifles used throughout American history.

Reverberation.

What will that one photo be?

It will be an Indian baby, shredded by a Gatling gun, lying dead and bloody in the snow.

It is a photo taken by a U.S. Cavalry soldier in the nineteenth century.

Very few people have seen that photo.

I have not seen that photo.

But I know it exists.

The Smithsonian keeps such photos locked away from us.

The United States wants all of us to forget the crimes it committed against the Indigenous.

The United States wants us to forget.

The United States wants us to forget.

The United States wants us to forget.

Sherman Alexie, from You Dont Have to Say You Love Me

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

On George Washingtons birthday, 2018, the Trump administrations director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, L. Francis Cissna, changed the agencys official mission statement, dropping the language of a nation of immigrants to describe the United States. The previous mission statement had said the agency secures Americas promise as a nation of immigrants by providing accurate and useful information to our customers, granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system.

The Trump administrations official negation of the US as a nation of immigrants was unlikely to change the liberal rhetoric. During Joe Bidens 2020 bid for the presidency, the campaign issued a statement on his immigration plan, titled The Biden Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants, asserting that unless your ancestors were native to these shores, or forcibly enslaved and brought here as part of our original sin as a nation, most Americans can trace their family history back to a choicea choice to leave behind everything that was familiar in search of new opportunities and a new life. Unlike the previous nation of immigrants statement, the Biden campaigns did acknowledge prior and continuing Native presence, as well as specifying that enslaved Africans were not immigrants. However, the new rhetoric continues to mask the settler-colonial violence that established and maintained the United States and turns immigrants into settlers.

It appears ironic that Donald Trump positioned himself as anti-immigrant, being the son of an immigrant mother (from Scotland) and the grandson of an immigrant paternal grandfather (from Germany), as well as being married to an immigrant (from Slovenia). But Trump was not against European immigrants. In a January 2018 staff meeting on temporary immigration status, Trump asked, Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.... Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? Why do we want all these people from Africa here? Theyre shithole countries.... We should have more people from Norway.

In his quest for the presidency, Trump made immigration the center of his campaign, focusing on the exclusion of Mexicans, promising to build a border wall and militarize the southern border. He claimed, The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody elses problems,

Democratic Party politicians and liberals in general insisted that Trump and his supporters were un-American in denying the nation of immigrants ideology that has been a consensus for more than a half century and remains a basic principle of the Democratic Party. Most people around the world viewed the US as a nation of immigrants, while questioning if the US was backsliding on its promise in electing Trump.

With the Democratic Party back in power in 2021, the nation of immigrants rhetoric appears be firmly back in place, although the exclusionary policies of the US will continue as they did during the Obama administration.

As Osha Gray Davidson, who has collected dozens of examples of how the phrase is used, points out, nation of immigrants is generally used to counter xenophobic fears.

A nation of immigrants was a mid-twentieth-century revisionist origin story. The United States emerged from World War II undamaged by bombs and heavy population loss, which was the experience of most of the combatant nations. In fact, the United States became a beefed-up industrial powerhouse exhibiting military might, including the atomic bomb. It was poised to become the economic, military, and moral leader of the free world. The country that actually defeated the army of the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, was the new adversary. US postwar administrations scrambled to conceal any trace of the United States colonialist roots, system of slavery, and continued segregation as they developed military and counterinsurgent strategies to quell national liberation movements in former European colonies. The Soviet Union and Communist China, which took power in 1949, denounced Western imperialism and colonialism in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Pacific, and the Caribbean.

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