How did a nation of migrants turn against immigration? America lost its self belief

Donald Trump tours the southern border with Mexico, 2024
Donald Trump tours the southern border with the president of the National Border Patrol Council, 2024 - AP/Evan Vucci

How did a nation of immigrants come to loathe immigration? That is what will need to be understood before the present state of American politics can be explained.

It might perhaps be predictable that the sudden arrival of great numbers of people from foreign countries would create resentment in Old World populations whose established roots go back as far as their families can be traced. But the United States was different: it was an invention of the modern conscience, specifically designed to absorb the “tired and poor” who were fleeing from persecution or hopelessness anywhere in the world.

The only condition was that you were prepared to make your own way and not become, as the warning at Ellis Island proclaimed, “a charge upon the state”. There would be no welfare system to look after you. You could enter, make this place your home and achieve anything of which you were capable so long as you accepted the principles of the Constitution and asked for nothing else. That was the deal.

And for the longest time, it seemed to work. Families like mine who fled the pogroms at the turn of the last century speaking no English and with only the belongings that they could carry, created opportunities for their children which would never have been possible anywhere else. They relied on their hereditary trades, or kept their shops open every day of the year, in order to put their children through university, preferably for training in medicine or the law. This was, after all, the “land of opportunity” in which self-reliance, aspiration and ambition were the ultimate virtues.

After the presidential election, which Donald Trump won almost entirely on the issue of mass migration, I had an email correspondence with my oldest friend. She had much more sympathy with the Trump voters than I would have expected, perhaps because she had stayed in the US and so remained in touch with the popular mood, when I had not. Our ruminations moved to our own childhood experiences as second generation children of immigrants.

This was her story: “My grandfather came to the States as a very young man with a wife straight out of the fields and two tiny children. He’d never had a day of school in his life. He couldn’t read or write, or speak English, of course. He started working on road gangs around Buffalo (New York state). In fifteen years, by the time my mother graduated high school, he was a rich businessman having worked like a dog and segued into being a mechanic and then opening gas stations and garages. He drove fancy cars and she wore fur coats and silk stockings to high school.”

She went on to say that her grandfather “knew the ancient Serbian epic poems by heart and used to sit with me for hours under his grape arbor and recite them to me. But my mother didn’t want me to learn Serbian. ‘You’re an AMERICAN’, she used to say all the time.”

This struck a chord with me. My father was of the first generation born into a Jewish community in Boston. He did not learn English until he went to school, having spoken only Yiddish at home and in his neighbourhood. But when I expressed a desire to learn Yiddish, he refused to teach me, claiming that he could not remember it – even though he still spoke it when he talked to his parents. He clearly did not want to perpetuate this tie to the past: we were AMERICAN now. The gratitude and sense of deliverance that this escape to the new world had given them had to be embraced wholeheartedly.

After our flurry of exchanged emails, it occurred to me that although my friend and I had known each other since we were eighteen years old and had discussed pretty much every aspect of our personal lives, we had never talked about this before. Perhaps we too, unconsciously, had avoided reviving the ties to our families’ pre-American history.

So what is going on now? Why do the descendants of all those earlier migrants whose patriotism arose from their gratitude, so resent the influx of this new wave that they will vote for a man who has made opposing immigration his leitmotif even if they dislike him? Maybe it is the magnitude of it: the huge, uncontrolled numbers flooding across an open border where once entry had been carefully monitored. With this massive influx comes the danger of separatist, enclosed communities which do not integrate with the wider society. But that was a pattern in the old time as well.

The reason my father did not need to learn English as a young child is because everyone in his neighbourhood was Jewish. Yiddish was spoken in the streets. On the Lower East Side of New York, all the shop signs were in Yiddish and slightly to the north, in Little Italy, everybody spoke Italian. And there were enclaves of Polish and German speakers too.

It was the schooling system that taught the next generation not only the new common language, but how to adopt the identity of proud Americans with all the rituals of patriotism which that involved.

Popular culture – from Superman comics (original motto: “truth, justice and the American way”) to sentimental Hollywood depictions of idealised family life – played a huge part in this as well. Where has all that gone?

The whole apparatus of joyful assimilation has been dismantled. What is taught to children now in their official initiation into national culture is historic guilt, irredeemable responsibility for past sins over which they had no control, and the idea that their country must somehow make endless amends.

Of course, that idealised earlier version of America we were offered from our earliest years was a naive fiction. This was a nation of displaced people and the chronic existential anxiety which arose from that was inescapable and emotionally damaging. There is a confident rootedness in the communities of the Old World which is missing from American experience.

What the US once offered instead was optimism and self-belief. When that confidence collapsed, migration became nothing more than a pestilential invasion.