America 201: We are a nation of immigrants from places besides Europe, too

It is likely that you have by now heard about Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-Mo.) speech at a right-wing conference on Tuesday. In it, he rejected the idea that America was “an abstract and vaguely-defined proposition” but, instead, a “nation and a people” in possession of “its own distinct history and heritage and interests.”

This is an explicit rejection of a long-standing tenet of American patriotism; Lincoln, you will recall, described America as a “new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” in his address at Gettysburg. But it’s more than that. The speech was also an explicit rejection of American pluralism and the United States’ role as (and beneficiary from being) a global melting pot.

“We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith,” Schmitt said, defining his boundaries quite clearly. These were the people he described as lamenting the “memory of a country that once belonged to them.”

The speech included a lot of the now-familiar, Manifest-Destiny-colored narrative about the virile men who once tromped their way out to the Pacific coast. Schmitt’s America is one whose history had been almost entirely written by the turn of the 20th century. He cherry-picked a few developments after that point; that, for example, Missourian Charles Lindbergh (actually a Michigander) had flown across the Atlantic. (Lindbergh, incidentally, would likely have approved of Schmitt’s speech.) But mostly it was a familiar pastiche of Founding Fathers and Intrepid Explorers and so on.

This is a recently popular view of American history, given the primacy it offers to Christian White men. It is also almost hilariously naive, failing to recognize that the America that existed in 1900 was a pale shadow of the one that exists today — thanks in no small part to the contributions of immigrants. Schmitt’s speech was a bit like a Nokia executive insisting that the company get back to its roots of making boots.

Last month, Pew Research Center published an important analysis of the immigrant population in the U.S. and the recent shifts that have been driven by President Trump and allies including Schmitt. Many on the right like to frame the recent increase in immigrants to the U.S. as an aberration (including by wildly exaggerating the scale and threat of that increase). Pew’s data shows that the density of immigrants in the population returned to about 15 percent — the levels seen in the late 1800s — after a period in the mid-20th century during which immigration was limited by law. Since Trump took office this year, though, that percentage has already dropped noticeably.

It is true that the most recent wave of immigration to the U.S. (beginning with the lifting of those anti-immigration restrictions in the mid-1960s) is larger than the waves that came before it (as explained by Pew). It is also true that the more-recent immigrants come from regions that the pre-restriction immigrants didn’t, including Latin America.

But that scale is deceptive. The U.S. is far more populous now than it was at the end of the first big wave of immigration, the one that included nearly 12 million arrivals from Northern and Western Europe. The number of immigrants from that region was equivalent to about 18 percent of the country’s population at the end of that first wave. The number of immigrants from Latin America who’ve come since 1965, by contrast, is about 11 percent of the current U.S. population.

Of course, there was actually a fourth wave of immigration to the U.S. that largely preceded the influx from Northern and Western Europe. That was the wave that originated in Africa, involving unwilling migrants. It was those immigrants and their enslaved offspring who did most of the literal work of building the early United States. In 1890, Black people made up about 12 percent of the U.S. population.

The definition of “American” that Schmitt uses excludes Black Americans as well as immigrants from Latin America, Asia and anywhere besides Europe. That means that, per his definition, nearly half of all U.S. residents aren’t “Americans,” including an average of about 4 in 10 residents of each state.

Note the relatively small percentages in the southern states, a function of the unnamed first wave of “immigration” from Africa and immigration from Latin America in the most recent wave.

It’s important to note that a central reason that there were restrictions placed on immigration 100 years ago was the shift in the nations of origin between the mid-1800s and late-1800s waves of immigrants. Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were often viewed as dirty and unwelcome; their embrace of Catholicism was seen as a threat to the Protestantism that was prevalent in the U.S. at the time. (Schmitt, I’ll note, is a Catholic.) The largest mass lynching in U.S. history occurred in New Orleans in 1891 and targeted Italian immigrants.

If we assume that Schmitt’s embrace of America’s European heritage excludes any of those second-wave arrivals (he reserved specific praise for the “Scots-Irish” in his speech), then his definition narrows the pool of “Americans” significantly. Only 4 in 10 U.S. residents have ancestry that originated in Western or Northern Europe.

Schmitt’s hostility to immigrants is toxic in its own right, of course, but the Trump administration’s institution of hostility to immigration as federal policy has a specific problem: It threatens the American labor force.

Immigration to the U.S. has been the primary reason that the population has grown in recent years — growth that is now at risk. But the aberration of contraction is less important than its effects. As I wrote both in my 2023 book and for The Washington Post in April, the aging of America’s population is disrupting the balance between those who build the economy and those who depend on it. A higher percentage of elderly Americans — a group far larger than the population of immigrants — means more need for services from a population that has a lower density of working-age people.

One path out of the problem has been immigrants continuing to move to the U.S., building families and filling jobs. As immigration increased in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic, so did foreign-born workers as a percentage of the labor force. As the population of immigrants has fallen during Trump’s second term in office, so has the density of foreign-born workers in the workforce.

So far, the loss in foreign-born members of the labor force has been offset by an increase in the number of native-born workers. Trump’s value proposition is that this trend will continue.

But from 2020 to 2024, the number of U.S. residents who are aged 65 and up increased by 12.3 percent. The percentage of residents aged 18 to 64 — prime working age — increased only 1.5 percent.

Trump and allies like Schmitt have chosen not to frame immigrants to the U.S. as potential workers, instead often describing them as “military-aged males” — implying they came to the U.S. to fight rather than to work. That gives Trump and his party cover to uproot immigrants in the guise of protecting America — and “Americans” who’d been wringing their hands about the “country that once belonged to them.”

I will note, by the way, that I have every right to impugn Schmitt as an unwelcome Johnny-come-lately, as someone who doesn’t understand American heritage. My ancestor, Edward Bompasse, came to the not-yet-United-States from England in 1621 on the Fortune. Luckily for the senator, I understand that this actually doesn’t give me more right to define Americanism than anyone else or empower me to look at anyone whose ancestors arrived more recently with disdain.

Photo: Undated photo of American immigrants. (National Archives)