LEGAL IMMIGRANTS ARE AMERICA’S LIFEBLOOD
To understand what is wrong with Donald Trump’s repeated claim that migrants who are in the United States illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country,” take a moment to watch Bill Murray’s 1981 comedy, “Stripes.” In the movie, Murray is trying to inspire a ragtag group of losers struggling to pass Army basic training. “We’re all very different people,” he exhorts them. “We’re not Watusi. We’re not Spartans. We’re Americans, with a capital ‘A.’ You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse! We’re the underdog! We’re mutts!”
Our country does not have a singular bloodline to be poisoned. Americans can trace their roots to every corner of the planet. Even if your ancestors came here on the Mayflower, you’re descended from boat people, the riffraff of 17thcentury Europe. They came here for the same reasons most immigrants come today: seeking a better life than what they faced in the place of their birth.
The reason we can make the audacious claim that we are an “exceptional” nation is because we are the first in human history not built on blood and soil, but on an idea: the idea of human freedom. Anyone (including Spartans) can become an American. Our mixed-breed heritage distinguishes us. “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman,” President Ronald Reagan once said, “You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk or Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
This is precisely why we need not fear the rise of nationalism in America. In most countries, nationalism is based on ethnicity. But ours is a creedal nationalism — a commitment to the supremacy of the American idea. European nationalism is inherently exclusive; American nationalism is inherently inclusive, open to those who come here legally and accept our creed, our Constitution and our founding principles.
Today, our creedal nationalism is under assault from both the left and right. On the left, some are trying try to convince us that America is a systemically racist country that isn’t really all that great. On the right, some self-styled “national conservatives” are seeking to foist European-style blood-and-soil nationalism onto the American body politic. This is inimical to our founding principles. The Declaration of Independence says that “all men” — not all “Americans” or “U.S. citizens” — are created equal. Although we have sometimes failed to live up to those principles, when immigrants come here and jump into what we used to call the “great American melting pot,” they can become as American as any of us.
Fortunately, most Americans still believe this. According to a Gallup poll from July, a 68% supermajority says immigration is a good thing for the country (up from 52% in 2002). Just 27% of Americans consider it a bad thing.
The problem at our Southern border is not that so many people want to come here. It’s that many are coming here illegally. It’s that our government lets millions of people enter without screening out criminals and those who wish our country harm. It’s that transnational drug cartels take advantage of the porous border to flood our country with deadly fentanyl. It’s that economic migrants abuse the asylum system and crowd out actual refugees. It’s that the border chaos makes it impossible to reach bipartisan consensus to fix our immigration system.
But the fact is, we need legal immigrants. There are
8.7 million unfilled jobs in the United States, and there are not enough native-born workers to fill them. According to Census Bureau data, the U.S. population is now growing at less than replacement levels. The only thing stopping us from overall population decline is immigrants.
Far from poison, immigrants are a lifesaving transfusion into the American bloodstream. That includes the Trump family. The former president is descended from a mix of German and Scottish immigrants. (His grandfather came here in 1885 as a 16-yearold German barber, while his mother was a domestic worker who grew up in hardscrabble circumstances in Scotland.) His children by Ivana Trump and Melania Trump are GermanScottish-Czech or German-Scottish-Slovenian mix. His grandchildren on the Kushner side have a Polish-Jewish background. And his grandchildren by Eric and Lara Trump have Slovak, English, German, Swiss-German and Dutch heritage.
Yes, we urgently need to secure our border. But the moment we start worrying about the purity of our blood, we will abandon what makes us exceptional — and become just another country. And that is no way to make America great again.