America is a nations of settlers, not a nation of immigrants or based on ideas

America is a nations of settlers, not a nation of immigrants or based on ideas. By John Daniel Davidson in The Federalist.

Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, only eight were not born in the American colonies — they were born in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. All of them were subjects of the British crown, and each of them came to the colonies as colonists and settlers, not immigrants. They traveled from one part of the British Empire to another. …

The “nation of immigrants” line is not just ahistorical, though. It’s an insidious attempt to redefine American identity away from the shared bonds of culture and history that have always defined a nation, and assert instead that America is “an idea” or a “creedal nation,” as Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch recently said.

What terms like this really mean, what they are meant to convey, is that instead of being a distinct people descended from common ancestors, America is something far more plastic and ephemeral: a set of Enlightenment propositions about human nature and natural law that anyone can adopt. All you have to do to become an American, according to this view, is assent to those propositions and sign some documents. A recent arrival from Somalia, so long as he has all his paperwork in order and has gone through the proper bureaucratic process, is just as American as someone whose family has been here since the seventeenth century.

Every knows that is absurd position, but often people are afraid to say so for fear of being called a racist or an ethno-nationalist. That’s because the “creedal nation” argument is often framed as a binary: America is unique among the nations of the world because we have a “civic nationalism,” not “blood-and-soil nationalism.” Or, our American identity is based on the founding creed, not on ethnicity — as if ethnicity is the only alternative to creedalism. The implication is that anyone who rejects the creedal nation idea is an ethno-nationalist/racist who thinks only white people can be real Americans.

But of course one need not be an ethno-nationalist to reject the creedalists’ claims about American identity. …

It is a people who came from a particular culture and religion, British and Christian. Its creed is universal in the same way the Christian creed is universal: it is open to everyone willing to convert, change their life, and be transformed. That’s what assimilation really means.

The immigrant must leave behind the cultural practices of his homeland and adopt American culture and habits as his own — above all, he must adopt the Christian idea that all men are created equal, with all the implications that flow from that. That is harder to do than it seems, and it doesn’t happen at all under conditions of mass immigration.

And that’s what all this really comes down to. Not everyone who emigrates here will become an American. Ilhan Omar, for example, will probably never become an American, no matter how long she lives here. That’s because being an American doesn’t mean just being physically present in the United States, with all your documents in order, in hopes of making a lot of money or amassing a lot of power. It means joining, and being adopted into, an existing people — a people with a shared past and a common future and a distinct heritage and cultural patrimony.

Most foreigners, if they fully understood what it meant, would not even want to assimilate. People after all tend to love their own cultures and ancestral homelands, and they generally do not want to leave them behind for another. That’s why so many immigrants today fail to assimilate, or don’t even try. That’s also why, in 2026, it’s worth asking whether we should keep allowing them to hold high federal office.

What has been lost? Here’s a Coca-Cola commercial from 1976 in the US:

 

 

Ditto Australia, obviously. Australia was only started up by the British after they lost their colony in America in 1776, and they needed somewhere new to put prisoners and settlers.