Once more proving that the USA is not, and has never been, “a nation of immigrants”:
Proponents of immigration to the United States often contend that the country is a “nation of immigrants,” and certainly immigration has played an important role in American history. Nevertheless, immigrants currently represent 13.5 percent of the total U.S. population, the highest percentage in over 100 years. The Census Bureau projects that by 2025, the immigrant share of the population will reach 15 percent, surpassing the United States’ all-time high of 14.8 percent, reached in 1890. Without a change in policy, that share will continue to increase throughout the twenty-first century. Counting immigrants plus their descendants, the Pew Research Center estimates that since 1965, when the United States liberalized its laws, immigration has added 72 million people to the country—a number larger than the current population of France.
Given these numbers, it is striking that public officials in the United States have focused almost exclusively on the country’s 11 to 12 million illegal immigrants, who account for only one quarter of the total immigrant population. Legal immigration has a much larger impact on the United States, yet the country’s leaders have seldom asked the big questions. What, for example, is the absorption capacity of the nation’s schools and infrastructure? How will the least-skilled Americans fare in labor market competition with immigrants? Or, perhaps most importantly, how many immigrants can the United States assimilate into its culture? Trump has not always approached these questions carefully, or with much sensitivity, but to his credit he has at least raised them.
Notice that the intrinsic dishonesty of the civic nationalists rears its head again when they claim second-generation Mexican immigrants are NOT immigrants, because paperwork, but fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-generation American colonists somehow are. How could the USA ever have been “a nation of immigrants” when, dating back to the American Revolution, the majority of white Americans of English descent were citizens born in the United States?
Where was George Washington born? Where was Thomas Jefferson born? Where was John Adams born? From where did they emigrate?