Often attributed to Mark Twain — perhaps mistakenly, since no historical source shows he actually made the statement — “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is a common and apt refrain when discussing the connection between historical perspectives and current events. By drawing on knowledge of what happened in the past, and why, we are better able to understand the flow and direction of the history collectively created in each new day.
“Past Rhymes With Present Times” is a series by Lloyd S. Kramer exploring historical context and frameworks, and how the foundations of the past affect the building of the future.
Debates about America’s national identity might be described as an endless conflict between two opposing definitions of the United States. Those who define the nation as an imagined community built on the civic ideals of unalienable human rights and democratic self-government face never-ending opposition from those who define the essential national identity as an ethnic, racial, or religious heritage.
The aggressive governmental actions against vulnerable immigrants in 2025 thus grow out of long-term struggles to define the meaning of America as well as contemporary accounts of Americanism that portray recent migrations as simply a dangerous invasion of the United States.
Although the federal agents who work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are trying to deport every undocumented immigrant they can find, this huge Trumpian project also requires the local help of government workers in states like North Carolina. Our General Assembly has therefore eagerly enacted new laws (overriding Governor Stein’s vetoes in July) that will force state agencies and law enforcement officers to facilitate more ICE detentions of “unauthorized aliens.”
Civic Nationalism and Ethnic Nationalism
The most important civic descriptions of American identity affirm the beliefs in human equality and democratic self-government that shaped the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
This inclusive vision of American ideals is also inscribed in the pedestal of the Statue of the Liberty, where Emma Lazarus’s poem, The New Colossus, appears on a bronze plaque to remind visitors that the statuesque “Lady” represents a national message: “Give me your tired, your poor,/ your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/” as the poem imagines the statue’s symbolic meaning. “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”
Historians have described such language as “civic nationalism” because it asserts that outsiders can choose to become national citizens by swearing allegiance to the ideas and institutions of the national political culture. Modern democratic societies such as the United States and France have therefore based national identity and citizenship rights on shared civic ideals, though civic nationalisms also carry ethnic and cultural components.
“Ethnic-defined” nations use more restrictive criteria to define their citizens as persons born into the nation’s unique blood, soil, or creed. Civic themes also exist within ethnic nationalisms, yet racial, religious, or linguistic identities set the boundaries of national citizenship.
Ironically, the most vehement “America-first” advocates of American exceptionalism often assert ethnic, nationalist ideas that became most influential in the modern nationalisms of central Europe. MAGA-style nationalists, in other words, promote the “non-exceptional” ideologies of European ethno-nationalisms, whereas America’s real exceptionalism emerged in its theoretical openness to citizenship for people from every existing cultural, religious, linguistic or ethnic ancestry.
Immigrants on deck of steamer “Germanic,” passing the Statue of Liberty. Illus. in: Frank Leslie’s illustrated newspaper, 1887 July 2
The Anti-Immigrant Traditions of Ethno-Nationalism in the United States
Despite America’s enduring civic ideals, ethnic descriptions of American national identity have mobilized anti-immigrant movements during almost every period of our national history (with expanding governmental powers since ICE was created in 2003). Among the many insightful accounts of this historical pattern, Erika Lee’s America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (2019) provides a well-researched overview that can be summarized with a few notable examples.
The targeted groups have differed in each historical era, but the same themes have constantly reappeared in angry claims that racially alien immigrants were committing crimes, carrying diseases, taking jobs from American-born workers, voting illegally in elections, and threatening to replace the nation’s white population. The hostility for new immigrants has thus repeated dehumanizing stereotypes that white Americans have also used to deny equal rights to Native Americans and African Americans.
The first great wave of anti-immigrant political action developed in the campaign against Irish Catholics, when the Know-Nothing Party (officially called the “American Party”) charged that Irish immigrants were bringing a “flood of ignorance, vice, and crime… into the heart of the country.” Proclaiming that “Americans must rule America,” the Know-Nothings gained control of eight governorships by the end of 1855 and began deporting immigrants to Ireland, Canada, and England.
The fear of Irish immigrants gradually declined after the Civil War as the Union’s military victory reaffirmed the civic nationalism of the Gettysburg Address. A new fear of Chinese immigrants swept through the country during the 1870s, however, and entered national law in 1882 with a “Chinese Exclusion Act” that banned immigration from China. This “temporary” measure remained in place for more than 60 years and provided a model for similar campaigns to block the arrival of (allegedly) “unassimilable” Jews and Catholics who were streaming into the United States from eastern and southern Europe.
The popular ethno-nationalist writer Madison Grant published a best-selling book, “The Passing of the Great Race” (1916), and worked with the “Immigration Restriction League” in arguing that immigrants should come only from the Nordic “race of soldiers… rulers, organizers, and aristocrats.” This ideology led to the race-based Immigration Law of 1924, which extended the anti-Asian restrictions into an immigration system that closed the United States to almost all Africans and eastern Europeans.
Mexican workers were nevertheless allowed to continue their traditional passage across the southern US border, so that more than two million people from Mexico were living and working in the United States when the Great Depression transformed Mexican workers into the nation’s most endangered immigrant population. Federal officials at the Bureau of Immigration collaborated with local governments to raid dance halls, parks, and public squares in which Mexicans congregated. At least 12,000 people were quickly forced to leave Los Angeles County, but Texas was even more aggressive in deporting roughly 130,000 Mexicans before 1933.
Mexicans bound for the Imperial Valley to harvest peas. Near Bakersfield, California. (November 1936, Dorothea Lange)
Each national upheaval generated new hostility for immigrants, as Japanese Americans learned during the Second World War. Japanese immigration had already been banned, in part because political leaders such as Senator James Phelan of California argued that Japanese workers would “destroy American civilization.” The anti-Japanese campaign after 1941 built on this prewar idea by incarcerating 120,000 people (including some 80,000 native-born Japanese Americans) in ten different internment camps.
The legacies and policies of white ethnic nationalism thus remained powerful throughout the 1940s, notwithstanding the readmission of Mexicans who were needed to reduce wartime labor shortages. But history never stands still, and the civic nationalist “welcome” for immigrants emerged again as part of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s—which sparked new anti-immigrant ideologies that later expanded into Islamophobia.
Civic Nationalism and the Multicultural American Nation
The history of anti-immigrant ideologies and repressions suggests why some Americans don’t want to call the United States a “nation of immigrants,” even though almost all American citizens are descended from immigrants (or have immigrated themselves) and even though immigration has always contributed to the nation’s economic and cultural creativity. These contributions have helped to sustain a civic nationalist tradition that celebrates the immigrant enrichment of American society and continually rejects anti-immigrant ideologies.
In the year when Madison Grant was stoking fears about the “passing of the great race” (1916), for example, the younger American writer Randolph Bourne published an Atlantic Monthly article entitled “Trans-National America” to condemn the scapegoating of immigrants for America’s social problems. “We have needed the new peoples… to save us from our own stagnation,” Bourne stressed in an argument that described the nation’s “heterogenous peoples” as the dynamic foundation of American exceptionalism.
“America is coming to be… a transnationality,” Bourne wrote, “a weaving back and forth… of many threads of all sizes and colors;” and this multicultural tapestry was the nation’s unique asset in the global struggle to construct modern democratic societies.
Bourne’s ideas were soon rejected in the restrictive Immigration Law of 1924, but the praise for multicultural immigration reemerged in the wider political culture during the 1950s after the Irish American Senator John F. Kennedy published A Nation of Immigrants (1958) to explain how “the contribution of immigrants can be seen in every aspect of our national life” and why “the wisest Americans have always understood the significance of the immigrant.”
This perspective may have helped Kennedy win key states in the 1960 presidential election, and it led to his proposal for replacing race-based immigration laws with new guidelines that would allow immigrants from all parts of the world to enter the United States. Although Kennedy’s bill did not advance in the Congress before his death, President Lyndon Johnson gained congressional approval for a new Immigration Law in 1965 that abolished racial quotas and placed flexible national caps on global immigration.
The new law provoked opposition from ethno-nationalists, but it also established new national restrictions on Mexican workers whose previous back-and-forth migrations across the US-Mexico border were transformed into the illegal actions of “undocumented” people.
The removal of race-based immigration laws, however, aligned America’s new immigration system with the Civil Rights movement and with the 1965 Voting Rights Act by affirming that America was a civic ideal rather than a specific racial-religious identity.
ICE and the Meaning of American Nationalism in 2025
The current ICE-organized arrests and deportations thus take America back to earlier periods of ethno-nationalist history, but they represent only one of American nationalism’s political and cultural traditions. Our future and more inclusive, post-Trumpian nation will need to rebuild a civic nationalism that views multicultural democracy as the nation’s most valuable or exceptional political aspiration.
Americans thus face an inescapable moral question in the Age of Trumpism: how do we move beyond this present (but not unprecedented) time in which masked ICE agents are sending immigrants to gruesome deportation camps without judicial hearings or legal defenses? The answers to that question must include new alternatives to the anti-immigrant nationalism of 1882, 1924, and 2025 and a never-ending defense of the unalienable human rights that sustain modern democracies.
Photo via Lindsay Metivier
Lloyd Kramer is a professor emeritus of History at UNC, Chapel Hill, who believes the humanities provide essential knowledge for both personal and public lives. His most recent book is titled “Traveling to Unknown Places: Nineteenth-Century Journeys Toward French and American Selfhood,” but his historical interest in cross-cultural exchanges also shaped earlier books such as “Nationalism In Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities Since 1775” and “Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions.”
