Your comparison to the country’s past is mistaken on two levels. First, most previous waves of immigrants came to a much more sparsely populated country with a much weaker national government. Folks created settlements and kept to themselves. My wife’s family came here before the revolutionary war and went west to Oregon, and she’s still has almost entirely British ancestry.
Second, immigrants are almost by definition unusual people who are highly tolerant of change and honestly a little anti-social. My parents were willing to leave Bangladesh where all their family is and come to America. I would never do that, and most Bangladeshis wouldn’t either. Just because our ancestors are immigrants doesn’t mean we have any obligation to like change any more than anyone anywhere else. That’s a matter of personal temperament.
And immigrants do change the culture. My family came to Northern Virginia along with a wave of other Asians. And guess what? We changed it. We changed the politics, we changed the culture, we changed the education levels. The place I grew up doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t begrudge anyone who misses the still somewhat southern WASP culture of the place—I certainly do.
Nowhere have I argued for any particular immigration policy. Immigration law is complicated and I get that. I have only taken a stance against nationalism. We can have a rational discussion about immigration without resorting to nationalist stereotypes and rhetoric.
> Italian immigrants brought the Mafia with them—the turn of the 20th century was a peak in the country’s foreign born population and also its homicide rate.
https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent...
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/imm...
Not the stats I'm finding. Foreign-born population as a percentage is pretty constant from 1870 to 1910, while murder peaks between 1920 and 1930, after the foreign-born population has already started to decline a bit. Murder then begins a dramatic increase in the 1970s, a decade in which the foreign-born population is at an all time low. Between 1990 and 2020 the murder rate has dropped dramatically even as the foreign-born population has grown to levels not seen since 1920.
This is exactly the kind of nationalistic rhetoric I object to. People spout "facts" that they heard from other people that would at best amount to a correlation if the numbers were true—and the numbers rarely are true—and use those "facts" as justification for stereotypes.
> Folks created settlements and kept to themselves.
Not really. The early settlers in my area fought wars with and displaced the natives—there are place names around here that still reflect those battles. The same is true in Oregon, as anywhere else in the Americas.
> And immigrants do change the culture.
Agreed! I'm observing it right now in my area.
For the record, I'm not a cosmopolitan urban American. I'm in a deep red state in flyover country. My ancestors (and my wife's) were the first settlers here. I'm proud of my ancestry, and I feel a deep connection with that past. I know exactly what it's like to be living in a place that your ancestors settled and to feel like it's changing.
However, I also take great issue with the Republican rhetoric surrounding immigration. I'm not talking about stereotyped rhetoric imagined in the left-wing media, I'm talking about conversations I regularly have over dinner or around the water cooler. I'm talking about growing up under the impression that Hispanic people were either lazy or drug dealers and that if we let too many of them in they'd ruin the country for "real" Americans.
I'm opposed to American nationalism because when I finally had the chance to interact with large numbers of immigrants, they not only didn't match the stereotypes, they were exactly the opposite in every way. I'm opposed to American nationalism because my ancestors left their homes and moved out West looking to get away from prejudice and hate—because they built a new world out here in collaboration with a lot of people who were very different than they were—and I owe it to their memories to be willing to do the same. They were no strangers to change, so I don't know why I should expect to be.