The concept of settler colonialism can help illuminate the historical processes that led many Americans to see their society as uniquely open to the immigrant experience despite these contradictory facts. Emma Lazarus, who descended from German and Portuguese Jewish immigrants, was not wrong to understand her family’s story as genuine proof of American inclusivity. Indeed, that very drive to induce migration meant that for many Europeans, ethno-racial divides (French versus German versus Italian) and even religious ones (Protestant versus Catholic versus, eventually, Jewish) were far less salient in the U.S. context. Even the turn to “white” as a central social category indicated a growing internal equality, hybridity, and amalgamation among Euro-Americans. All of this went hand in hand with extreme controls for those deemed outsiders.
Racial quotas and formal Jim Crow may be gone. But at the same time, new migrants, the bulk of whom since 1965 have been nonwhite, have not enjoyed nearly the same embrace—never mind noncitizen voting and easy access to land—that marked earlier eras. Certainly, some immigrants from the Global South, especially those highly educated, have found pathways to real inclusion as “model minorities” or the “right” kind of immigrant. But undocumented individuals, by contrast, often find themselves engaged in hard and exploitative work, the result of longstanding and state-sponsored patterns of production, and under the continuous threat of legally sanctioned violence. They overwhelmingly come from parts of the world that would have marked them as the “wrong” type of migrant; devoid of legal let alone political rights, their experiences mirror elements of work and life under the old Jim Crow.
Thus, the dynamics of settlement offer productive answers to questions of why the golden door opened, and why it has been so firmly closed. The experience by many Americans of the country as a nation of immigrants was birthed out of policies aimed at territorial expansion and demographic transformation. When those needs declined, those policies were clawed back. During the Cold War, the desire to win hearts and minds in the Global South and to answer to domestic civil rights politics led to a meaningful if partial revival of immigrant inclusion. Today, however, with the civil rights era and the Cold War imperative of global inclusivity both faded memories, the U.S. baseline is a militarized border of detentions and deportations, further intensified by Trump.
Trump has taken advantage of a longstanding pattern in these dynamics: the fluidity of the boundary between insider and outsider. At each historical stage, who gets to benefit from American prosperity has shifted. Now one sees the willingness of even some nonwhite immigrants and Black Americans to embrace nativism and to view their own freedom as threatened by more recent migrants.