Il conflitto between Donald Trump and some federal judges of courts lower than the Supreme Court on the actual power of the president to to deport en masse and in a summary way the immigrants irregular as well as suspend jus soli for the children of illegal immigrants and temporary visitors born in the United States has rekindled a debate, never completely dormant, on what is the nature of American society and on who can to consider oneself an American.
Nation of immigrants and melting pot
There are two principles that The Donald is trying to refute with its zero-tolerance policy against the illegitimate presence of foreigners: the vision of the United States as “a nation of immigrants” – to quote the title of a very famous pamphlet signed, but not written, in 1958 by the not yet president John Fitzgerald Kennedy – and the idea that Americans represent the product of a melting pot, literally of a crucible or melting pot, a metaphor that is generally traced back to the play of the same name staged in 1908 by playwright Israel Zangwill.
On the one hand, the concept of "nation," understood as a community of belonging rather than a simple land of arrival, reflects the intent to integrate newcomers into American society and involve them in its decisions and choices, starting with the granting of citizenship and the right to vote, rather than simply offering them a destination where they could pursue their own "American dream" of social advancement, improved economic conditions, and/or the achievement of political and religious freedom.
On the other hand, the notion of a melting pot implies that the essence of Americans is a shared national identity, one that immigrants are also allowed to contribute to over time. From this perspective, the paradigms of the immigrant nation and the melting pot form the foundation of the dynamics of inclusion developed over time by the United States.
The misunderstandings of the melting pot
Zangwill He was a repentant Zionist who, in the early twentieth century, came to see the United States as the new “promised land” of the Jewish people. his conception of the melting pot It envisioned the possibility of integrating all new arrivals and, therefore, encouraged the acceptance of any immigrant, regardless of their country of origin.
At the time it was a very successful interpretation, because it helped to reassure an American public opinion that was extremely concerned about the problem of how to assimilate those approximately thirteen million individuals who, between 1901 and 1915, were landing in North America and who were not of Anglo-Saxon stock like the historical nucleus, still predominant, of the nation.
In Zangwill's vision, the gestation of the American was still underway and the final product would be enriched by the contributions of all the peoples who landed in the country. Was missing, therefore, the idea that the immigrants had to comply to a pre-established model, in whose development they had no part. Zangwill, however, also insisted that in the United States, European nationalities were dissolving.
Therefore, what characterized those who chose America as their new homeland was the abandonment of the prejudices and culture of their homeland, to embrace the values and identity of their adopted country.
The protagonists of his drama, the Jew David and the Christian Vera, immigrants from the Tsarist Empire, fell in love and were eventually able to live out their relationship happily in America because, although he was the sole survivor of a pogrom in which his family had been exterminated by her father, they had both metaphorically left in Russia the legacy of the bloody clashes between different faiths and had embraced the principle of religious tolerance prevailing in the United States.
An emphasis on this last aspect, which ended up misunderstanding Zangwill's original message, led to the conclusion that, rather than acting as a melting pot in which Americans were also a component, the melting pot operated as a sort of filter that purified those who landed in the United States, making them suitable for life in their new homeland.
In other words, they should have melted into the metaphorical pot it's only foreigners, not Americans, who arewhich the newcomers were called upon to make themselves similar. The automotive giant Ford Motor Company wanted to give a visual demonstration of how the boiling of the melting pot was nothing other than a mechanism of Americanization, understood as the need to conform to the Anglo-Saxon characteristics of the adopted country.
As he recalled Ezekiel Kweku in an intervention on New York Times Last July 3, on the eve of World War I, the English language diploma ceremony, awarded by Ford's company school to foreign-born workers preparing for U.S. citizenship, was preceded by a spectacle during which people dressed in traditional costumes and holding the flags of the company's employees' respective countries of origin passed behind the silhouette of a huge pot and emerged all wearing identical business suits and waving the Stars and Stripes.
In 1954 the historian George R Stewart he went so far as to speak of transmuting pot, to indicate a dynamic in which the immigrants introduced into Zangwill's melting pot did not constitute the ingredients of a new American, different from the one present at the time of their arrival because still devoid of their contribution, but were in fact "transmuted" into a pre-existing type of American.
The anticipation of the melting pot
Nor was the precursor to the Zangwill-inspired paradigm for describing the outcome of the interaction between immigrants and American society much more inclusive. In his Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1792, the former French consul in New York, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, argued that "an American is one who, casting aside all old prejudices and customs, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new position he occupies."
Not everyone, however, could participate in this process. The individual destined to become an American, as described by Crèvecoeur, was not just any immigrant, but "a European or the descendant of a European." More precisely, the American was "a mixture of English, Scottish, Irish, French, Dutch, German, and Swedish."
Skin color and belonging to the United States
The independence of the United States had been recognized less than ten years earlier, with the Peace of Paris in 1783. Yet Crèvecoeur had already understood that the newborn Republic she was not willing to welcome just anyone. After all, xenophobic instances measures to exclude unwanted foreigners had been in place since before the outbreak of the War of Independence.
In his Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, written in 1751 and published in 1755, Benjamin Franklin, one of the future fathers of the country (the only politician to have signed all four founding documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Military Alliance with France, the Peace of Paris and the Federal Constitution), complained that Pennsylvania, a colony created by the Englishman William Penn, had become the preferred destination for Germans in North America and, half-jokingly, advised the descendants of its founder to learn German quickly so as not to feel like strangers in their own country.
In a fit of racism to try to block the arrival of immigrants from Germany, Franklin went so far as to argue that the Germans were less white than the English because they were darker in complexion. His statement anticipated the main initial criterion for exclusion from the American nation, as a community of individuals, although not from the possibility of entering and remaining in the United States: skin colorAs Crèvecoeur had intuited, without excessive effort, in 1792, to be considered American one had to be European, in other words one had to to be white.
Not by chance, until 1868, citizenship was not recognized American to people of origin or African ancestry, not even to those legally free during the period in which slavery remained legal in some Southern states, that is, until the end of the Civil War in 1865. The same fate befell the Native Americans before 1924, with a few exceptions, but starting in 1887, creating a paradoxical situation, not to say grotesque, because obviously these people were much more American than European immigrants and their descendants, in the sense that they had lived in the United States for a longer time. For similar reasons, immigrants Asian were barred from attaining U.S. citizenship until 1952, with the major exception being the Chinese, although in their case only since 1943.
A long history of xenophobia
Like Zangwill's optimistic conception of the melting pot, the principle of the "nation of immigrants" is also diminished by the restrictionist demands that have pervaded the entire history of the United States. Alongside Franklin, another father of the country, Thomas Jefferson, the principal drafter of the Declaration of Independence, saw more disadvantages in immigration which benefits and in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1782) he suggested, albeit in vain, to suspend it for a quarter of a century, so that the new arrivals, coming from a Europe marked by monarchic regimes, would not pollute the institutions and political life of the nascent American Republic.
Efforts to block the mid-nineteenth century were no more successful.Catholic immigration in what remained a society still dominated by the Protestants of Anglo-Saxon stock. These attempts were made in response to the wave of nearly two million Irish of Celtic ethnicity who flocked to the United States to escape starvation during the potato famine that struck Ireland between 1845 and 1852, but who were seen as potential papist agents, bearers of a plan to subjugate America to the will of the Roman Pontiff.
The first measure to prevent the immigration of an unwelcome population considered unassimilable was passed in 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act blocked the entry of Chinese for ten years. The ban was extended for another decade in 1892 and indefinitely in 1902. In 1907 the Washington government reached an agreement with that of Tokyo under which the latter committed to not issuing passports to its citizens intending to move to the United States in exchange for the federal administration's commitment to prevent the segregation of Japanese students in schools in California, the main recipient state of flows from the Far East.
These measures, once again, assumed as an exclusion criterion the different skin color of Asian compared to Americans of European or African origin, with the latter not being able to be banished after the abolition of slavery and the granting – albeit merely theoretical – of the same rights to blacks as whites at the end of the Civil War.
With the First World War, an attempt was also made to hinder the arrival of Southern and Eastern Europeans, who were not of Anglo-Saxon stock and therefore seemed unsuitable to live in the United States.
The introduction of a literacy test in 1917 proved insufficient to stem these flows, due to the increase in school enrollment in countries in Southern and Eastern Europe.
To put an end to the mass arrivals from these regions they provided two laws of 1921 and 1924. For the first time, an annual maximum limit for entries was introduced and visas were distributed according to the country of origin, with the precaution of favouring the Northern European states, from which people almost never emigrated anymore, and to penalize those of theSouthern and Eastern Europe, where there was a strong desire to move to the United States.
For example, all'Italy, from which over 300.000 people had arrived in 1919, 42.057 visas were granted in 1921 and just 3.845 in 1924. In contrast, at UK 77.342 and 34.007 visas were granted respectively and Germany 67.607 and 51.227. Precisely to denounce this inequality between the different countries, in 1958 Kennedy He associated his name with the image of the United States as a "nation of immigrants." However, it was his successor in the White House, Lyndon B. Johnson, to succeed in abolish the national quota system in 1965, assigning each country theor same number of visas (20.000) each year, but confirming an overall annual limit on entries that prevented the restoration of the mass flows of the past.
Cracks in the melting pot
In the meantime it was the melting pot paradigm has disappearedThis model suffered its first severe blow during the First World War. At that historical juncture, for example, Americans of German and Irish descent did their utmost to maintain Washington's neutrality in the conflict: the former because they were aware that their adopted country's entry into the war would be on the side of the Entente against the Germany; the latter because they were convinced that, deprived of American support, the UK would have lost the war and the defeat of London would have created the conditions for the independence of Ireland.
- Italian Americans, instead, they pressured the United States to take action against Austria-Hungary and, at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, tried to push President Woodrow Wilson to support Italy's nationalist claims to Fiume. These and other forms of mobilization of ethnic minorities in defense of the interests of their respective nations of origin demonstrated that the ties of immigrants and their descendants with their countries of origin were far from melted and that, therefore, Zangwill's crucible had failed to transform them into real Americans to the extent that they had not left behind all involvement in European affairs.
Subsequently, the concept of melting pot was definitively sunk by the participation of the United States in the war of Vietnam since the mid-1960s. Washington, having intervened in the name of defending freedom from communist totalitarianism, found itself supporting the authoritarian regime in Saigon, a veritable military dictatorship, and American troops were guilty of numerous war crimes.
In this context, members of ethnic minorities became convinced that the supposed American values of freedom, equality and democracy, in the name of which they had been induced for decades to erase their ancestral heritage, were in reality disvalues. Therefore, the incentives for Americanization were scaled down and the different national groups rediscovered and tried to valorise the cultural roots that linked them to their respective countries of origin.
Overcoming the melting pot
The homogenizing dynamics of the reinterpretation of the melting pot had already been stigmatized in 1915 by the philosopher Horace M. Kallen in an essay with a very explicit title in denouncing the nationalism that was the foundation of the principle that referred to Zangwill: Democracy versus the Melting Pot.
This model, in Kallen's view, was more prescriptive than descriptive; it imposed a certain behavior on immigrants, rather than describing their free choices in interacting with their adopted country. Kallen therefore contrasted the melting pot with the concept of cultural pluralism, a vision of American society in which each immigrant minority, rather than conforming to the dominant culture, would contribute to its enrichment, preserving their own unique characteristics in a harmonious relationship with those of other groups.
The ethnic revival of the late 1960s led to the rediscovery of Kallen's theories. Furthermore, the notion of the "nation of immigrants," relaunched by Kennedy shortly before, transformed into the vision of the United States as a "nation of nations." melting pot gave way, therefore, the step to the idea of "cultural mosaic"which paradigm best corresponds to survival and rebirth of ethnic particularisms, while the metaphor of the melting pot gave way to other symbols: from the salad bowl, the'salad bowl where the vegetables are mixed without blending together, at the same time ethnic stew, the ethnic stew in which the multiple ingredients retain their own distinct flavor.
“Make America white again”
Il nationalism in the approach to theimmigration and in the subsequent definition of who is an American, from which Kallen had distanced himself in 1915, he has returned to dominate the policies of the government in Washington. in an even more exasperated form with the presidency of TrumpAccording to The Donald, the United States is a projection of Europe and, consequently, only those which are of European ancestry they can say real American.
It's no coincidence that during his first term, during a disagreement with four progressive Democratic Party representatives—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of Puerto Rican descent, African-American Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, and Ilhan Omar, born in Somalia—the tycoon had inelegantly invited them to return "home," as if their non-European descent precluded them from full membership in the United States. Along these same lines, Tennessee Republican Congressman Andy Ogles recently proposed revoking the US citizenship of Zohran Mamdani, the recent winner of the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City and current member of the New York State Legislature. Mamdani is a Ugandan immigrant of Indian descent who became a naturalized American citizen in 2018.
After returning to the White House, Trump rescinded deportation protections for about half a million Haitian refugees, all people Afro-descendants, which had been decided by Joe Biden for humanitarian reasons, and began to cancel visas issued to African students to attend schools, colleges and universities in the United States. On the other hand, The Donald has said he is ready to welcome thousands of Afrikaners, the white South Africans descendants of the Boer colonizers, who they consider persecuted by the Pretoria government of black president Cyril Ramphosa for alleged racial reasons.
Furthermore, the vast majority of immigrants summarily deported in the six months since the second settlement are made up of Hispanics and the federal administration has effectively expelled some US citizen children, forcing them to follow their mothers, of non-European descent like their children, who were repatriated to Central America because they were illegal immigrants.
These decisions by Trump, taken together, all seem to be signals to return to defining the ideal American as “a European or the descendant of a European,” As Crèvecoeur observed at the end of the eighteenth century, it was as if Native Americans, and especially the millions of Africans, Asians, and Hispanics who moved to the United States over the following two centuries, had left no trace on the country's population. From this perspective, The Donald's electoral slogan "Make America great again" could legitimately be paraphrased with the formula "make America white again” (let's make America white again).
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Stefano Luconi He teaches History of the United States of America in the Department of Historical, Geographical and Ancient Sciences at the University of Padua. Le his publications They include The “Indispensable Nation.” History of the United States from its Origins to Trump (2020), US Institutions from the Drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022 (2022), The Black Soul of the United States. African Americans and the Difficult Road to Equality, 1619–2023 (2023). The Race to the White House 2024. The Election of the President of the United States from the Primaries to Beyond the Vote of November 5 (2024).
