Not “a Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

Historian Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States) gives the lie to America’s self-image as an immigrant nation in this fiery account. She casts the current surge of populism as the latest episode in a history of U.S. nativism that stretches back before the nation’s founding, and contends that America only welcomes immigrants when they can be exploited or recruited to its project of settler colonialism, which was “grounded in the violent theft of land and in racial slavery.” She also deconstructs the musical Hamilton to show how it ignores the fact that Alexander Hamilton opposed immigration and owned slaves, and describes how people of Scots-Irish descent dispossessed Native Americans and then claimed themselves as indigenous to the regions they settled. Discussing waves of Irish, Italian, Jewish, Asian, and Hispanic immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries, Dunbar-Ortiz explains how each group fled persecution and poverty only to face racial, ethnic, and religious intolerance from previous U.S. settlers. Dunbar-Ortiz’s careful recounting of the suffering and complicity of each group is skillfully done, though the leaps from one historical time period to the next can be jarring. This impassioned and well-documented history pulls no punches. (Aug.)