“A nation of immigrants” can also be said about any nation, as no group of people simply sprung out of the ground and lived exactly in the same place since the dawn of man. It is inherently a cliché used as a weapon in bad faith, designed explicitly to deconstruct the identity of any national identity.
by Kevin DeAnna
Mayor Lou Barletta (right), the rare elected official who actually seems to care about his constituents and his country, is speaking out about a class called “War in Hazleton” at Temple University. Professor Lori Zott has formed a multi-disciplinary class which looks at the immigration battle in Hazleton, Pennsylvania — from a multicultural perspective of course. Judging from the syllabus, the class hammers away with the usual brain dead narratives – but includes some heretical ideas at the end, for those who want to hear it.
The class syllabus begins with the inevitable poem from Emma Lazarus, which unfortunately for America, was attached to the Statue of Liberty. As with just about every issue in American “higher” education, this is a sign that “huddled clichés” are about to substitute for serious thinking about a policy problem. Week One, for example, tells us that America is a nation of immigrants. It states, “Although every resident of the United States is either an immigrant or the descendent of an immigrant (except the indigenous people) this country has a long history of “nativist movements” in which one group of immigrants brands another as ‘alien.'”
Already, the class is in liberal fantasy land. Of course, America is not a nation of immigrants, it is a nation of pioneers and settlers, characterized by an identifiable core culture of British settlement. The indigenous people are not the “First Americans,” they were not considered Americans at all for many years (see our Declaration of Independence and its description of the “merciless Indian savages” for more on this view). This is also why we consider the American polity to have truly begun with the Pilgrim Fathers at Plymouth and the settlement of Jamestown.