America as the Creedal Nation: A Response to Paul Gottfried

A few days ago, I wrote a response to Mark Brennan's essay in Chronicles Magazine arguing that the idea of America as a "Creedal Nation" is a "myth," because anyone who knows anything about American history knows that America has always been identified by its "Anglo-Protestant culture."  Yesterday, Paul Gottfried, the editor-in-chief of Chronicles, responded to my post by defending Brennan's claim as a "self-evident" truth about American history.

So what historical evidence does Gottfried cite to support his belief that, of course, America has always been culturally homogeneous in its identity as an "Anglo-Protestant" nation that does not depend on any affirmation of the Lockean liberal ideas of the Declaration of Independence?

PROTESTANT AMERICA?

To prove that "there was a long-time Protestant dominance over American religious and moral life," Gottfried cites this passage from Michael McClymond's chapter in The Cambridge History of Religions in America:

Statistics tell a story. The newly formed United States of America included roughly 300,000 Protestant Christians in the year 1800. Yet by the year 1950, this number had grown to 43 million. This is a 143-fold increase, or a growth of 14,300 percent. The figure becomes more striking when one considers that the population of the nation, according to the United States Census, increased during the same period by the order of 28.4 times, from 5.3 million to 150.7 million. The increase in Protestant Christian affiliation during this period was 5.0 times the rate of the general population increase. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark noted that “the most striking trend in the history of religion in America is growth.” The overall rate of religious adherence in the U.S. population steadily climbed from 17 percent in 1776, to 34 percent in 1850, 45 percent in 1890, 56 percent in 1926, 59 percent in 1952, and 62 percent in 1980.

There are three interesting points here that Gottfried doesn't notice.  First, I fail to see how "17 percent in 1776" shows "Protestant dominance."  Indeed, the conclusion that McClymond draws from this (in a passage not quoted by Gottfried) is that "it is a mistake to think that there was a Christian golden age in the United States during the colonial era," because "the period of lowest religious affiliation in American history occurred around 1800 when there were much lower levels of church membership than at the present."

Second, when we speak about the growing numbers of "Protestant Christians," what kind of Protestantism are we talking about?  Is it the illiberal Protestantism of John Winthrop or the liberal Protestantism of Roger Williams?  In my post, I argued the Protestant liberalism of Williams--based on the liberal principles of toleration and religious liberty--eventually prevailed over Winthrop's illiberal theocratic principles.  I also pointed to the Constitution of 1789 as manifesting William's liberalism: the "no religious test" clause, the "no establishment of religion clause," and the absence of any reference to God or Jesus Christ made it clear that the Constitution did not establish America as a Protestant Christian Nation.  Brennan and Gottfried are silent about all of this.

Third, notice the title of the book from which Gottfried quoted: The Cambridge History of Religions in America:  "religions" is plural because this three-volume book is all about the religious pluralism of American history.  There are chapters on over two dozen religious traditions:  native American religion, Catholicism (actually a half dozen different traditions of Catholicism), Eastern Orthodox, Judaism, African religions, Islam, and many more.  In the Introduction to the book, the editor states the conclusion that emerges from the book:  "The net result of this historical development in North America is a rich religious culture that includes representatives of most of the world's religions. . . . One result of the religious freedom mandated by the Constitution was the dramatic expansion of the religious diversity in the new nation."  Gottfried is silent about this.

BRITISH AMERICA?

First of all, let's remember that the American Revolution was to a large degree a civil war fought over the question of whether America's national identity was fundamentally British.  The American Patriots (or Whigs) said no.  The American Loyalists (or Tories) said yes.  That's why the Declaration of Independence was a declaration of the separation of the American People from the British People, and the statement of Lockean liberal principles in the Declaration was the justification for that separation.  By claiming that American national identity is necessarily British, Brennan and Gottfried take the losing side in the American Revolutionary War.  (They also take the losing side in America's second civil war--another war in which the Lockean Whigs defeated the Filmerian Tories.)

Like Brennan, Gottfried cites David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed as confirming America's British identity.  But like Brennan, Gottfried is silent about my reference to Fischer's African Founders as showing how African folkways were mixed with British folkways to create a new American culture. 

Brennan and Gottfried are also silent about this passage from Gordon Wood's essay:

Because of extensive immigration, America already [in 1790] had a diverse society.  In addition to 700,000 people of African descent and tens of thousands of native Indians, nearly all the peoples of Western Europe were present in the country.  In the census of 1790, only 60% of the white population of well over three million were English in ancestry.  Nearly 9% were German, more than 8% was Scottish, 6% Scots-Irish, nearly 4% Irish, and more than 3% Dutch.  The remainder were Frenchmen, Swedes, Spaniards, and people of unknown ethnicity.

And notice that this 60% English ancestry would be even lower if one counted the African Americans.

As I said in my post, this racial, ethnic, and religious diversity of America increased dramatically over the 19th century when the U.S. had a virtually open borders immigration policy.  Brennan and Gottfried say nothing about this.  Nor do they say anything about how this massive immigration favored the Union over the Confederacy in the Civil War.

In my post, I pointed out the hypocrisy of people like J D Vance and Stephen Miller who argue that America needs severe restrictions on immigration because immigration creates too much cultural diversity, which dissolves the social cohesion and homogeneity of American culture.  I wrote: Does JD really believe that by marrying the daughter of Telugu Indian immigrants and creating a multicultural and interfaith family with biracial children that he is helping to dissolve the social cohesion of America?  No, of course not.  He doesn't really believe what he has said about immigration being a threat to America's cultural identity.

Gottfried quotes this passage but he doesn't answer my charge of hypocrisy against Vance.  Gottfried does conclude his essay this way:

I agree with much of what I hear JD Vance say and would happily vote for him. I also think his wife is a much nicer person than the scowling Methodist Hillary Clinton or the goofball Lutheran Tim Walz. But we may be coming too late in trying to restrict immigration to those who embody “our culture,” which means the one that has been obsessively vilified by our ruling class. Unfortunately, whatever has taken its place seems far, far worse.  

So it's all right for the Hindu Usha to be an American citizen because she's "nicer" than the Methodist Clinton or the Lutheran Walz?

And notice what he says in that last sentence: "we may be coming too late in trying to restrict immigration to those who embody 'our culture.'"  So is he saying that we should not restrict immigration to those who embody our Anglo-Protestant culture, because it is "too late" to do that?

My other example of hypocrisy was Stephen Miller, whose grandparents were Russian Jews.  Brennan and Gottfried make no attempt to defend Miller on this point.  This is personal for Gottfried because he was born into a Hungarian Jewish family that immigrated to the U.S. in 1934.  Can Gottfried also be charged with hypocrisy?  He does say this: 

As everyone who knows me knows, my family came as refugees to this country long after the country was founded, and I was not born into its onetime dominant culture.  But I profoundly respect that culture and am glad to live in a country that once embraced it.

Now what is he saying here?  That America should open its borders to immigrants who do not belong to America's Anglo-Protestant culture as long as they "respect" that culture?  

And what does he mean by "onetime dominant culture"?  When did that "onetime dominant culture" cease to be dominant?  Sometime before 1934 when his parents came to America?  Sometime before the Civil War during the long period of open borders?  In 1789 with the ratification of the Constitution, which some of the Antifederalists denounced as "godless"?

Both Brennan and Gottfried are so obscure in their writing that I find it very hard to understand exactly what they are saying.

The History of America Makes It a Creedal Nation

Now that we are in the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, there is debate over the significance of that document.  For Gordon Wood, the distinguished historian of the American Founding, writing in the Wall Street Journal, the Declaration helps Americans understand who they are, because it states those truths that Americans must hold to be self-evident--the truths of equal liberty--that make America a "creedal nation" rather than a nation defined by race, ethnicity, and religion.  But for Mark Brennan, writing in the January 2026 issue of Chronicles Magazine, Wood's creedal nation is a myth that contradicts the history of "America's Anglo-Protestant culture" as the real identity of the American nation (quoting from Samuel Huntington's Who We Are: The Challenges to America's National Identity).

Notice the contradiction in what people like Huntington and Brennan say.  They claim to be defending America's unique identity.  But the idea that national identity depends on race, ethnicity, and religion is a foreign idea imported from Europe and elsewhere outside America.  By contrast, America as a creedal nation as declared in the Declaration of Independence makes America uniquely American, unlike all the other nations.  Before 1776, no nation had ever had anything like the Declaration of Independence.

If you read Brennan's essay, you should notice that he arrogantly asserts that Wood is somehow ignorant of American history as showing that America has been always an Anglo-Protestant culture.  But he never presents even a brief summary of this history--as if it should be obvious.

Brennan does invoke David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America as showing that "the legacy of the four British folkways remains the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States today."  But Brennan is silent about Fischer's more recent book African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, in which he shows how slaves from different regions of Africa interacted with European colonists to create new regional cultures in the United States.  The mixing of African folkways and British folkways created a new American culture.

PROTESTANT AMERICA?

So what about Brennan's insistence on America's Protestant culture?  Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians cannot be real Americans?  And certainly Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and other religious traditions would have to be excluded.  Think about what that means.  

As I have indicated previously, it has become common for nationalist conservatives like J. D. Vance to say that America needs severe restrictions on immigration because immigration creates too much cultural diversity, which dissolves the social cohesion and homogeneity of American culture: if America had open borders, it would cease to exist as nation because it would have no distinctive social identity.

But remember that JD's wife Usha was born in 1986 in California to Lakshmi and Radhakrishna Chilukuri, who are both Telugu Indian immigrants, speaking the Telugu language, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s from Andhra Pradesh, which is a state on the east coast of southern India.  Usha met JD at Yale Law School.  They married in 2014 in an interfaith marriage ceremony: Usha is a practicing Hindu, while JD was raised as an Evangelical Christian before converting to Catholicism in 2019.  They have three children.

Hmm.  Sounds like a heck of a lot of cultural diversity to me.  Does JD really believe that by marrying the daughter of Telugu Indian immigrants and creating a multicultural and interfaith family with biracial children that he is helping to dissolve the social cohesion of America?  No, of course not.  He doesn't really believe what he has said about immigration being a threat to America's cultural identity.

                                         This Doesn't Look Like an Anglo-Protestant Marriage

Similarly, consider the strange case of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who wants to deport those immigrants who might threaten the cultural homogeneity of America.  As has been noted in a recent article in The New Republic, Miller's ancestors first arrived in the United States in 1903 when a man named Wolf Laib Glosser landed at Ellis Island, fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms in czarist Russia.  Glosser then began sending money back to relatives in Russia and helped them immigrate to the U.S.  But that was stopped by the Immigration Act of 1924 that shut down immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, because so many Americans thought they had to protect the purity of white, Christian, and western European culture.  Miller says he wants to restore something like the 1924 Act.  Does that mean that he and his family should be deported?  After all, his ancestry is neither Protestant nor English.  Of course, like Vance, Miller doesn't really believe what he says.

But let's go back to the beginning--to the earliest European immigrant settlers in North America in the seventeenth century.  What do we see?  Brennan would say: they were almost all Protestants!  Well, but what kind of Protestantism?

From 1607, the Virginia Colony had established Anglican churches in each county with taxpayer support.  But the Anglican Church was weaker in the other colonies, particularly in Puritan New England. In 1779, the Anglican Church was disestablished in Virginia; and in 1786, the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty separated church and state.  By 1833, all the states had abolished the state funding of established churches.

This vindicated Roger Williams in his defense of religious liberty against the Puritan theocracy that John Winthrop had established in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.  When Williams was banished from Massachusetts, he founded the city of Providence (later incorporated into Rhode Island) in 1637.  Williams thus became the first Founding Father of America by promoting the principles of religious liberty and separation of church and state that became a critical part of the American Creed of cultural pluralism.

Moreover, we should realize that Williams extended the principle of freedom of conscience to support toleration of not just all Protestants, but also Catholics, Muslims, pagans, and even atheists.  That broad principle of toleration is evident in the Constitution of 1789--particularly, in the "no religious test" clause, the no "establishment of religion" clause, and the Constitution's silence about God, which provoked some critics into denouncing the Constitution as "godless."  Thus, America's national identity was tied not to any particular religious tradition but to the creedal commitment to religious liberty and freedom of conscience, which protects Catholics like Vance and Jews like Miller from being persecuted.  This American history of toleration and pluralism denies Brennan's claim that the American nation must be Protestant.

ANGLO AMERICA?

Similarly, the American history of immigration denies Brennan's claim that American national identity depends on English ancestry.  Wood writes:

Because of extensive immigration, America already [in 1790] had a diverse society.  In addition to 700,000 people of African descent and tens of thousands of native Indians, nearly all the peoples of Western Europe were present in the country.  In the census of 1790, only 60% of the white population of well over three million were English in ancestry.  Nearly 9% were German, more than 8% was Scottish, 6% Scots-Irish, nearly 4% Irish, and more than 3% Dutch.  The remainder were Frenchmen, Swedes, Spaniards, and people of unknown ethnicity.

Brennan is silent about this.  He is also silent about the massive immigration into America during the long period of almost completely open borders from 1789 to 1921.  Between 1820 and 1924, 36 million people immigrated to the United States.  If their American-born descendants are added to this number, this would account for most of the growth in the U.S. population during this period--from 9.6 million in 1820 to 106 million in 1920.

This immigration altered the cultural and political history of the United States.  The most dramatic illustration of this is the American Civil War.  From 1830 to 1860, ten million foreign born people crossed America's open borders and settled in the United States.  This made them one-third of the total 30 million Americans in 1860.  That was a critical turning point in American history because this huge migration helped to decide the outcome of the Civil War.  

In response to Lincoln's election in 1860, the secessionist Southern States left the Union and started the Civil War a few weeks after Lincoln's inauguration because they saw this as the only way to preserve slavery.  As I have indicated in previous posts, the Civil War can be seen as a war over the interpretation of the Declaration of Independence--over whether the declaration that "all men are created equal" in their rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" really includes all men of all races, or whether it includes only "the white race," or perhaps only the British people.

In a speech in Springfield, Illinois, on June 12, 1857, Stephen Douglas argued that the framers of the Declaration of Independence surely did not include the "African race" in its principle of equality.  Rather, what they meant was "that they referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they declared to have been created equal--that they were speaking of British subjects on this continent being equal to British subjects born and residing in Great Britain--that they were entitled to the same inalienable rights, and among them were enumerated life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Douglas 1857, 9).

Two weeks later, Lincoln spoke in Springfield.  He quoted the passage above from Douglas's speech, and he remarked: "Why, according to this, not only negroes but white people outside of Great Britain and America are not spoken of in that instrument.  The English, Irish, and Scotch, along with white Americans, were included to be sure, but the French, Germans, and other white people of the world are all gone to pot along with the Judge's inferior races."  Against this, Lincoln insisted that the Declaration of Independence really did extend its principle of equality to "all men" or "the whole human family," which would encompass all races, including all Europeans (Lincoln 1989, 1:398-99).

It should be noted, however, that one year later, Douglas began to speak of the "white basis" of government as "confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races" (Lincoln 1989, 1:504).  So, this indicated that he was no longer confining the principle of equality of rights to the British people.

On July 10, 1858, Lincoln delivered a speech at Chicago that stated the arguments that he would develop in his debates with Douglas that would begin a month later; and his fundamental argument was about the principle of equality of rights in the Declaration as embracing all Americans and including both black Americans and foreign immigrants.  When we celebrate the Fourth of July, he said, we celebrate the men of 1776--"a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers."  But we also realize that of the 30 million American people of today, many are not descended by blood from those first Americans.  We have

. . . perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe--German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian--men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things.  If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.  That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world (Lincoln 1989, 1:456).

This leads him to the conclusion of his speech--that we should reject all talk about "inferior races": "let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man--this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position--discarding our standard that we have left us.  Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout the land, until we shall once again stand up declaring that all men are created equal."

So, what unites the native-born Americans and the foreign-born Americans as "one people" is their patriotic love of America and their affirming the universal principle of the Declaration of Independence that all human beings are born free and equal.  What makes Americans Americans is their moral character as "patriotic and liberty-loving men."

In the Civil War, Lincoln made it clear that enforcing the Declaration's principle of equality of rights as the "standard maxim for free society" would require not only emancipating the black slaves but also promoting free immigration into the United States.  And once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, it became clear that a victory for the Union in that war would be a victory for this expansive interpretation of the Declaration of Independence.

Remarkably, the eventual Union victory depended in large degree on the millions of immigrants who had entered the United States under the open borders policy.  The key to Lincoln's strategy for defeating the Confederacy was exploiting the advantage of the Union in its greater numbers of soldiers--over twice as many as the Confederates.  This was due to the greater population of the Northern states, which gave them a greater pool of potential military recruits.  Not only was the Confederacy weakened by its small total population--about one-third that of the Union--but as a slave society, the Confederacy lacked access to 40 percent of its adult male military-age population, who were enslaved and thus not eligible for service.  This left about 965,000 free white men between the ages of 18 to 45 to draw on for military service.  But then, of course, not every adult white man could serve.  This meant that at most the Confederacy could put an army of no more than about five hundred thousand men in the field.

The greater population of the North can be explained as largely the consequence of the liberal social order in the North that had attracted millions of immigrants from overseas and many migrants from the South.  The comparatively open and free society of the North offered more opportunities for people seeking a better life than did the illiberal South where slaves did most of the work.  As Lincoln said, in the free states, an ambitious man "can better his condition" because "there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer" (1989, 2:144).  Of the ten million overseas immigrants to the United States who entered from the 1830s to the 1850s, most of them (about seven-eighths) settled in the North.  Also, the migration of white Southerners to the North was three times greater than the migration from the North to the South.  Over 40 percent of the Union's armed forces were immigrants and the sons of immigrants--totaling about 600,000 out of 2.1 million.  The Confederacy had only a few thousand immigrants fighting for them.

As I have argued previously, global human migration shows what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free.  John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies.  The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous societies.  While countries like New Zealand have adopted the Lockean liberal immigration policy, the United States under the rule of Trump the Nationalist is raising barriers to immigration, which means that if the United States continues to move away from Lockean liberalism, it will become a loser in this evolutionary process of cultural group selection, in which people vote with their feet in favor of freedom.

But once Trump and the MAGA Republicans are out of power, we can work to restore the promise of America as a creedal nation dedicated to that "electric cord" in the Declaration of Independence "that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world."

Open Borders Would Make America Great Again

This is a slightly revised version of an essay that I originally posted in August.

President Trump is trying to end illegal immigration by closing the borders to illegal immigrants and by deporting all of the 16 million or more illegal immigrants now in the U.S.  To do this, he has mobilized tens of thousands of police officers (Border Patrol and ICE) and military personnel across the country to enforce his directives; and in many cases, people have been arrested, detained, and deported without constitutional due process of law.  This looks like a police state and a military dictatorship.

The better way to end illegal immigration would be to make immigration legal.  U.S. borders should be open to all immigrants who satisfy certain minimal criteria.  And illegal immigrants already in the U.S. should be provided a pathway to legal resident status.  Those with a criminal record and those unable to support themselves economically should be deported.

This would not violate anyone's constitutional rights.  And this would respect the natural human right to freedom of trade:  people have the right to engage in any voluntary exchange that is mutually beneficial as long as it does not unduly harm any third parties.  This freedom of trade includes not only goods but also services and labor.  If a foreigner wants to accept a job offer from a willing American employer, or rent an apartment from a willing landlord, no one has any right to stop them.  These are contracts between consenting adults.  When governments restrict immigration, they're barring free trade between natives and foreigners.  This not only denies our freedom to trade, but it also deprives us of the wealth that would be created by such trade.  Some economists have estimated that completely free immigration would double the GDP of the global economy, which would mean that there would be almost no poverty in the world (Clemens 2011).

Now, of course, there is one problem here in what I have just said.  People have the right to engage in free trade--voluntary exchanges that are mutually beneficial to both parties--but only on the condition that this does not severely harm any third parties--creating what economists call "negative externalities."  Governments use their coercive powers to prevent free immigration because many people believe that free immigration has large externalities.  

People think free immigration would be economically harmful because low-skilled immigrant workers lower the average standard of living for native workers.  People also think immigrants benefit from government services and welfare state programs in ways that burden native taxpayers.  And don't many immigrants become dangerous criminals and terrorists?  Don't these immigrants also introduce foreign cultural beliefs and practices that undermine and even dissolve the national culture of the native people?

I will respond to these objections in future posts.  But here I only want to make the point that during the colonial settlement of America and then during the first one hundred and fifty years of American national independence, America had virtually open borders; and it was during that latter period that the United States became the richest and most powerful nation in the world.  So, if Americans want to Make America Great Again, they will have to once again open their borders to immigrants.

OPEN BORDERS IN COLONIAL AMERICA

Although we all know that the American colonists were immigrants, most of us do not appreciate the stunning scale and diversity of that movement of immigrants to colonial America, which shows the attractiveness of America for immigrants and the lack of restrictions on immigration.  In the fifteen years between the end of the Seven Years War and the Revolution--1760 to 1775--approximately 125,000 people from the British Isles immigrated to America (55,000 Irish, 40,000 Scots, and 30,000 Englishmen).  There were also at least 12,000 immigrants from the German states and Switzerland, and 84,500 enslaved Africans forcibly imported to the southern colonies.  This total of 221,500 arrivals in this fifteen-year period was almost 10 percent of the population of America in 1775, which means an annual entry of about 15,000 people, which was close to the population of Boston during these years (Bailyn 1986a, 9; 1986b, 26).

Moreover, this movement of immigrants was multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-lingual.  Historian Bernard Bailyn describes it as "a composite of ethnic and religious groups--Germans, French, Swiss, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, English, Caribbean islanders, Africans, Afro-Americans--carrying with them different cultural baggage, different patterns of family organization and discipline, different ways of working and living together" (1986a, 59).  10 percent of the pre-Revolutionary population was German-speaking.  In Georgia, "the colony was so polyglot that a successful magistrate needed to speak fluently in at least three languages and preferably four" (1986a, 17).

The American colonists knew that this openness to immigration was crucial for their economic and social growth.  At the same time, some British leaders worried that the immigration to America would weaken Great Britain through depopulation, and there were attempts to restrict immigration to the colonies.  

In the Declaration of Independence, this was one of the grievances against the King: "He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands" (para. 9).  This is a complaint against British efforts to veto colonial legislation for assisting and encouraging immigration and British policies for limiting land grants to immigrants (Bailyn 1986b, 55-56). 

THE AMERICAN NATION'S OPEN BORDERS, 1789-1921

When the Constitution was ratified in 1789, immigration had made the United States the most ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse society in the Western world.  The Constitution's enumeration of congressional powers did not include any general power to regulate immigration, but it did include a power over naturalizing immigrants as citizens: "to establish a Uniform Rule of Naturalization" (Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 4).  The Constitution also required citizenship as a qualification for some of the officers of the national government.  No one could be a member of the House of Representatives who had not been a citizen of the United States for at least seven years.  Senators had to have been a citizen for at least nine years.  And the presidency was restricted to only natural-born citizens.

The First Congress established the first uniform rule of naturalization through the Naturalization Act of 1790.  The Act provided that (1) any alien being "a free white person," (2) who has resided in the United States for two years shall become a naturalized citizen after proving to a court that (3) he is "a person of good character," and (4) after taking an oath or affirmation to support the Constitution of the United States.

This Act also provided that the children of such naturalized citizens being under the age of 21 years shall be considered citizens of the United States, and that the children of citizens of the United States born out of the limits of the United States shall be considered natural born citizens.

In 1795, Congress amended this law to require that a declaration of intent to become a citizen must be submitted at least three years before naturalization, and to extend the minimum residence requirement to five years.

In 1798, as part of the Alien and Sedition Acts, a Congress controlled by the Federalist Party lengthened the period for the declaration of intent to five years, lengthened the residence requirement to fourteen years, and barred the naturalization of any alien from a country at war with the United States.

In 1802, after the victory of Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party in the election of 1800, the Congress repealed the previous laws and restored both the five-year residence requirement and the three-year declaration of intent period.

The critical point to notice here is that although the Congress limited naturalization to "free white persons," it did not limit the entry of immigrants who became residents but not citizens.  (The Naturalization Act of 1870 extended eligibility for naturalization to African Americans.)

From 1789 to 1875, the borders of the United States were completely open to immigrants.  Then, from 1875 to 1921, the borders were largely open with a few exceptions.  In 1875, the Congress prohibited the immigration of convicts, East Asian women, and indentured servants.  In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which did indeed exclude Chinese from immigrating to the United States.  This was the one big exception to the rule of open borders.

Between 1820 and 1924, 36 million people immigrated to the United States.  If their American-born descendants are added to this number, this would account for most of the growth in the U.S. population during this period--from 9.6 million in 1820 to 106 million in 1920.

The most severe restrictions on immigration began in 1921 with the Emergency Quota Act and in 1924 with the National Origins Quota Act, which set very low quotas for European immigration, particularly for Southern and Eastern Europe.  Those who wrote and supported this legislation (like the Ku Klux Klan) were clear that they wanted to protect the racial purity of the "American stock" from the degeneration of Catholics and Jews.  The total immigration quota of 165,000 for countries outside the Western Hemisphere was an 80% reduction from the average before World War I.  Remarkably, however, there were no restrictions on Mexican or Hispanic immigration from Central America and South America.

The 1924 Act also created the U.S. Border Patrol and established a consular control system that allowed entry only to those who obtained a visa from a U.S. consulate.

The 1924 Act was revised by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and finally replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which went into effect in 1968.  Although this established a more liberal immigration system than the 1924 Act, the 1965 Act was still much more restrictive than the open immigration system of the nineteenth century.  Since 1968, the average inflow of immigrants per year in proportion to the resident population was more than double what it had been from 1922 to 1967, but this was still less than half the inflow of immigrants from 1820 to 1921 (Nowrasteh and Powell 2021, 193).

IMMIGRANTS IN LINCOLN'S NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM

Scottish, Swedish, German, Irish, and French Soldiers of the Union Army at the Siege of Corinth, Mississippi, 1862

From 1830 to 1860, ten million foreign born people crossed America's open borders and settled in the United States.  This made them one-third of the total 30 million Americans in 1860.  That was a critical turning point in American history because this huge migration decided the outcome of the deepest crisis in American political culture.  

In the presidential election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln's victory depended upon his winning a large portion of the immigrant vote--particularly, the Germans, who were staunchly anti-slavery.  Lincoln won the Northwestern states of Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Iowa by winning huge majorities in German districts (Holzer 2024, 133-36, 144-45).  Again, in the election of 1864, Lincoln won reelection with the support of German voters (Holzer 2024, 303-20).

In response to Lincoln's election in 1860, the secessionist Southern States left the Union and started the Civil War a few weeks after Lincoln's inauguration because they saw this as the only way to preserve slavery.  As I have indicated in previous posts, the Civil War can be seen as a war over the interpretation of the Declaration of Independence--over whether the declaration that "all men are created equal" in their rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" really includes all men of all races, or whether it includes only "the white race," or perhaps only the British people.

In a speech in Springfield, Illinois, on June 12, 1857, Stephen Douglas argued that the framers of the Declaration of Independence surely did not include the "African race" in its principle of equality.  Rather, what they meant was "that they referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they declared to have been created equal--that they were speaking of British subjects on this continent being equal to British subjects born and residing in Great Britain--that they were entitled to the same inalienable rights, and among them were enumerated life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Douglas 1857, 9).

Two weeks later, Lincoln spoke in Springfield.  He quoted the passage above from Douglas's speech, and he remarked: "Why, according to this, not only negroes but white people outside of Great Britain and America are not spoken of in that instrument.  The English, Irish, and Scotch, along with white Americans, were included to be sure, but the French, Germans, and other white people of the world are all gone to pot along with the Judge's inferior races."  Against this, Lincoln insisted that the Declaration of Independence really did extend its principle of equality to "all men" or "the whole human family," which would encompass all races, including all Europeans (Lincoln 1989, 1:398-99).

It should be noted, however, that one year later, Douglas began to speak of the "white basis" of government as "confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races" (Lincoln 1989, 1:504).  So, this indicated that he was no longer confining the principle of equality of rights to the British people.

On July 10, 1858, Lincoln delivered a speech at Chicago that stated the arguments that he would develop in his debates with Douglas that would begin a month later; and his fundamental argument was about the principle of equality of rights in the Declaration as embracing all Americans and including both black Americans and foreign immigrants.  When we celebrate the Fourth of July, he said, we celebrate the men of 1776--"a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers."  But we also realize that of the 30 million American people of today, many are not descended by blood from those first Americans.  We have

. . . perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe--German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian--men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things.  If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they ae part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.  That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world (Lincoln 1989, 1:456).

This leads him to the conclusion of his speech--that we should reject all talk about "inferior races": "let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man--this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position--discarding our standard that we have left us.  Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout the land, until we shall once again stand up declaring that all men are created equal."

So, what unites the native-born Americans and the foreign-born Americans as "one people" is their patriotic love of America and their affirming the universal principle of the Declaration of Independence that all human beings are born free and equal.  What makes Americans Americans is their moral character as "patriotic and liberty-loving men."

In the Civil War, Lincoln made it clear that enforcing the Declaration's principle of equality of rights as the "standard maxim for free society" would require not only emancipating the black slaves but also promoting free immigration into the United States.  And once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, it became clear that a victory for the Union in that war would be a victory for this expansive interpretation of the Declaration of Independence.

Remarkably, the eventual Union victory depended in large degree on the millions of immigrants who had entered the United States under the open borders policy.  The key to Lincoln's strategy for defeating the Confederacy was exploiting the advantage of the Union in its greater numbers of soldiers--over twice as many as the Confederates.  This was due to the greater population of the Northern states, which gave them a greater pool of potential military recruits.  Not only was the Confederacy weakened by its small total population--about one-third that of the Union--but as a slave society, the Confederacy lacked access to 40 percent of its adult male military-age population, who were enslaved and thus not eligible for service.  This left about 965,000 free white men between the ages of 18 to 45 to draw on for military service.  But then, of course, not every adult white man could serve.  This meant that at most the Confederacy could put an army of no more than about five hundred thousand men in the field (McCurry 2010).

The greater population of the North can be explained as largely the consequence of the liberal social order in the North that had attracted millions of immigrants from overseas and many migrants from the South.  The comparatively open and free society of the North offered more opportunities for people seeking a better life than did the illiberal South where slaves did most of the work.  As Lincoln said, in the free states, an ambitious man "can better his condition" because "there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer" (1989, 2:144).  Of the ten million overseas immigrants to the United States who entered from the 1830s to the 1850s, most of them (about seven-eighths) settled in the North.  Also, the migration of white Southerners to the North was three times greater than the migration from the North to the South.  Over 40 percent of the Union's armed forces were immigrants and the sons of immigrants--totaling about 600,000 out of 2.1 million.  The Confederacy had only a few thousand immigrants fighting for them (Doyle 2015, 158-81).

At the epic Battle of Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania, July 1-3, 1863, there were Irish troops fighting on both sides.  On the side of the Union was New York's 69th Infantry Regiment, the Fighting Irish, who played a key role in turning the tide of battle.  On the second day of fighting, July 2nd, the Irish Brigade chaplain Father William Corby (later to become President of the University of Notre Dame) stood upon a large rock in front of the brigade to offer general absolution for the Catholic troops.  Artist Paul Henry Wood painted a depiction of this legendary religious service based on memories of some surviving soldiers who were there.

An eyewitness recalled that "Father Corby reminded the soldiers of the high and sacred nature of their trust and the noble object for which they fought."  When he finished his remarks, all the men (both Catholic and Protestant) fell to their knees and prayed for God's merciful absolution.  The sounds of battle resonated all around them.  For many of them this would be their last prayer.

On the decisive third day of battle, July 3, the Irish units defended the center of the Union's position on Cemetery Ridge against the largest assault of the entire war:  General Robert E. Lee ordered General George Pickett to lead his men in a charge across almost a mile of open land, where the Rebels were exposed to the fire of Union troops, but with the hope that if the Rebels broke through the Union lines, this would give the Confederates a victory in the North that could be the decisive turn in the war.  

The Union Irishmen held their ground.  One veteran described it years later: they "stood immovable, unconquerable, fearless and splendid in their valor, the green flag waving side by side with the colors of their adopted country, both held aloft by the stone wall until the victory was assured, and the hosts of the enemy crushed."  Of the 532 men in the Irish Brigade, 198 were lost at Gettysburg, a casualty rate close to 40 percent (Holzer 2024, 270-72).

On November 20, 1863, Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery for the over 7,000 men--both Union and Confederate--who had fallen in those three days of battle.  He explained that those who had died on that battlefield had given their lives that the new American nation might live as the nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that are men are created equal.

It was for us the living, he added, to be dedicated to the unfinished work for which they died--"that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Only nineteen days later, Lincoln submitted his Annual Message to Congress, which indicated that the "new birth of freedom" would require not only the Reconstruction of the Southern States with emancipation of the slaves but also a new system for encouraging free immigration.

I again submit to your consideration the expediency of establishing a system for the encouragement of immigration.  Although this source of national wealth and strength is again flowing with greater freedom than for several years before the insurrection occurred, there is still a great deficiency of laborers in every field of industry, especially in agriculture and in our mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals.  While the demand for labor is thus increased here, tens of thousands of persons, destitute of remunerative occupation, are thronging our foreign consulates, and offering to emigrate to the United States if essential, but very cheap, assistance can be afforded them.  It is easy to see that, under the sharp discipline of civil war, the nation is beginning a new life.  This noble effort demands the aid, and ought to receive the attention and support of the government (Lincoln 1989, 2:541-42).

Notice that Lincoln saw immigration as a "source of national wealth and strength," particularly in satisfying the "demand for labor" at a time when the Civil War had created a severe labor shortage.  Notice also that he saw promoting immigration as especially important because "under the sharp discipline of civil war, the nation is beginning a new life"--the "new birth of freedom" that he foresaw at Gettysburg.

Lincoln wanted the government to allocate federal funding to assist immigrants who were "destitute of remunerative occupation" in foreign countries.  Although the Congress did not approve this proposal for direct funding of immigrants, the Congress did approve extending the benefits of the 1862 Homestead Act for foreign immigrants.  Congress also authorized the setting up of a Immigration Bureau in the State Department.  And the U.S. Emigrant Office in New York was authorized to help foreign workers find American jobs and arrange transportation for them (Holzer 2024, 288-98).  Lincoln signed the Act for the Encouragement of Immigration on July 4, 1864.

But Lincoln wanted more to be done for facilitating more immigration.  The 1864 Republican Party Platform resolved that "foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations, should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy" (Holzer 2024, 304).  In his Annual Message to Congress of December 6, 1864, Lincoln observed that the previously passed act for encouraging immigration

seems to need amendment which will enable the officers of the government to prevent the practice of frauds against the immigrants while on their way and on their arrival in the ports, so as to secure them here a free choice of avocations and places of settlement.  A liberal disposition towards this great national policy is manifested by most of the European States, and ought to be reciprocated on our part by giving the immigrants effective national protection.  I regard our emigrants as one of the replenishing streams which are appointed by Providence to repair the ravages of internal war, and its wastes of national strength and health.  All that is necessary is to secure the flow of that stream in its present fulness, and to that end the government must, in every way, make it manifest that it neither needs nor designs to impose involuntary military service upon those who come from other lands to cast their lot in our country (Lincoln 1989, 2:650).

It is remarkable that Lincoln wanted immigrants to be exempt from the national military conscription act that Congress had passed in 1863.  Although the great majority of Union soldiers were volunteers, the military draft was supposed to fill in when voluntary enlistments fell short.  Conscription was very unpopular, even provoking draft riots.  So Lincoln's offering exemption from the draft as an incentive for immigration shows how important free immigration was for him.

Perhaps even more impressive is how Lincoln saw immigration as ordained by God--"appointed by Providence" to be a "replenishing stream" to restore "national strength and health."

Isn't there enough evidence here to justify Trump and Vance in denouncing Lincoln as a crazy globalist and woke advocate of open borders? 

OPEN BORDERS AS CULTURAL GROUP SELECTION FOR FREEDOM

As I have argued previously, global human migration shows what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free.  John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies.  The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous societies.  While countries like New Zealand have adopted the Lockean liberal immigration policy, the United States under the rule of Trump the Nationalist is raising barriers to immigration, which means that if the United States continues to move away from Lockean liberalism, it will become a loser in this evolutionary process of cultural group selection, in which people vote with their feet in favor of freedom.

Not too far off Ellis Island in New York's harbor stands the Statue of Liberty, erected in 1886.  Lady Liberty holds a tablet in her left arm inscribed with a date--"July IV MDCCLXXVI"--that invokes the Declaration of Independence.  A poem is engraved at its base: "Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . ."  Notice that the only qualification for entry to America is that the immigrants "yearn to breathe free." By 1886, the annual number of immigrants entering the United States was approaching one million.

Lady Liberty is a globalist!

So we can expect that Trump will soon sign an executive order for replacing the Statue of Liberty with the Statue of Closed Borders.  Instead of Lady Liberty with her torch held high, we will have a burly masked ICE officer clubbing an immigrant. 

REFERENCES

Bailyn, Bernard. 1986a. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. New York: Random House.

Bailyn, Bernard. 1986b. Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution. New York: Random House.

Clemens, Michael. 2011. "Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 25: 83-106.

Douglas, Stephen. 1857. Remarks of the Hon. Stephen Douglas, on Kansas, Utah, and the Dred Scott Decision. Chicago: Daily Times Book Office.

Doyle, Don H. 2015. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. New York: Basic Books.

Holzer, Harold. 2024. Brought Forth On This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration. New York: Dutton.

Lincoln, Abraham. 1989. Speeches and Writings. 2 vols. Ed. Don Fehrenbacher. New York: Library of America.

McCurry, Stephanie. 2010. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Nowrasteh, Alex, and Benjamin Powell. 2021. Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART TWO: The History of Migration with Interbreeding

1830s-early 1900s.  During this period, annual European migration to North America increased to about one million.

The pattern of migration from the 1830s to the 1850s--both external migration of Europeans into the U.S. and the internal migration within the U.S.--explains the victory of the liberal North over the illiberal South in the American Civil War (1861-1865).  Because of the greater population of the North, the Union army was always at least twice as large as the Confederate army.  And this was largely the consequence of the liberal social order in the North that had attracted millions of immigrants from overseas and many migrants from the South.  The comparatively open and free society of the North offered more opportunities for people seeking a better life than did the illiberal South where slaves did most of the work.  As Abraham Lincoln said, in the free states, an ambitious man "can better his condition" because "there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer" (1989, 2:144).  In 1858, Lincoln had stated the liberal definition of liberty as the principle that "each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man's rights" (1989, 1:449).   Lincoln thought the Civil War was a practical test of whether any nation dedicated to such a principle of equal liberty could long endure.

Of the ten million overseas immigrants to the United States who entered from the 1830s to the 1850s, most of them (about seven-eighths) settled in the North.  Also, the migration of white Southerners to the North was three times greater than the migration from the North to the South.  Over 40 percent of the Union's armed forces were immigrants and the sons of immigrants--totaling about 600,000 out of 2.1 million.  The Confederacy had only a few thousand immigrants fighting for them (Doyle 2015, 158-81).  The number of Union soldiers was also increased, beginning in 1863, by the recruitment of emancipated slaves as soldiers.  By the end of the war, there were as many as many as 200,000 black Union soldiers.  This illustrates how migration as cultural group selection favors liberal regimes.

1882.  One of the groups that benefited from the long period of virtually open borders for the U.S. was Chinese people who immigrated to California to work as miners during the Gold Rush and then to become railroad workers.  This provoked anti-Chinese bigotry in America.  In 1882, the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the U.S.  This was the first immigration law directed against a particular ethnic or national group of people.

1914-1918.  The World War of 1914-1918 created increased suspicion of foreigners and restrictions on freedom of movement that led many countries to establish the first requirements for identity papers, passports, and visas for travel.  Many people noticed that this was a radical change from the free movement and migration that was possible before 1914.  The Austrian author Stefan Zweig lamented this:

Before 1914, the earth had belonged to all.  People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased.  There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I traveled from Europe to India and to America without a passport and without ever having seen one. . . . Nothing makes us more sensible of the immense relapse into which the world fell after World War I than the restrictions on man's freedom of movement and the diminution of his civil rights (Goldin, 2024, 140).

1916.  The first edition of Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, Or the Racial Basis of European History was published in 1916.  Grant was the preeminent conservationist and eugenicist of his time.  In The Passing of the Great Race, he laid out his evolutionary anthropology of the "Nordic race" as superior to all other human races.  He warned that the Nordic race in America was being replaced by immigrants from non-Nordic Europe and that the Nordic race was being outbred by inferior racial stocks.  Grant agreed with Arthur Gobineau in dividing mankind into three distinct races: Caucasoids (based in Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia), Negroids (based in Sub-Saharan Africa), and Mongoloids (based in Central and Eastern Asia).  But Grant subdivided Caucasoids into Teutonic Nordics, Slavic Alpines, and Mediterraneans.   The Nordics had evolved in a harsh Northern European climate that made them a tough, virile race capable of conquering weaker races.

To preserve Nordic America from replacement and extinction, Grant proposed severe restrictions on migration (both the external migration of non-Nordic Europeans to America and the internal migration of American blacks from the American South into the Northern States).  He also proposed laws for sterilizing people from inferior races and prohibiting miscegenation.  He succeeded on most of these points.  Many states passed forced sterilization laws.  The U.S. Congress accepted his proposals for quotas on immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.  He supported the passage of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 in Virginia, which made it a crime for white people to marry or interbreed with black people (defined by the "one-drop rule").  Adolf Hitler wrote a letter to Grant praising him for his book and saying that this book had become "my Bible."

1924.  The U.S. Congress created the U.S. Border Patrol and passed the Immigration Act of 1924 (or Johnson-Reed Act).   Following the recommendations of Madison Grant and others, the proponents of this act were explicit in stating that its purpose what to protect the ethnic homogeneity of America from being corrupted by foreign races.  It established a quota system that prohibited Asian immigration and severely limited Jewish and Catholic immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, while favoring white Protestant immigrants from Northwestern Europe.  The Act was endorsed by eugenicists and the Ku Klux Klan (which was at the peak of its power in the 1920s).  

Hitler praised the law in Mein Kampf:  "The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements, and simply excludes the immigration of certain races.  In these respects, America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic volkisch conception of the state."  In another writing, Hitler explained:

That the American Union feels itself to be a Nordic-German state and by no means an international Volker-porridge is also revealed by the apportionment of immigration quotas among the European Volker.  Scandinavians, that is to say, Swedes, Norwegians, furthermore Danes, then Englishmen and finally Germans have been accorded the largest contingent.  Latins and Slavs receive very little, and the Japanese and Chinese are groups that one would prefer to exclude entirely (Whitman, 2017, 46-47).

1933-1945.   On April 7, 1933, two months after Hitler's rise to power, the Nazi government became the first government to formalize the term Aryan in national legislation: the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service declared that only Aryans could be civil servants, and Aryans were defined as those without Jewish parents or grandparents.  This "Aryan Paragraph" subsequently entered many racial laws.  In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws required "proof of Aryan ancestry" as a prerequisite for Reich citizenship.  From this point on, until Germany's defeat in 1945, the Nazi Regime enforced a fundamental distinction between Aryans, who were the superior race with the right to be free, and Jews, who were the inferior race with no right to be free or even to live.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the noun "Aryan" as "a member of the group of prehistoric peoples thought to have spoken proto-Indo-European, the hypothetical language from which Indo-European languages are believed to derive."  The word "Aryans" was coined by historical linguists in the 19th century based on the Sanskrit word arya.  In the oldest text of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, composed between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago, the warrior god Indra rides against his impure enemies, or dasa, in a horse-drawn chariot, destroys their fortresses and secures their land for his people, the arya.  When linguists noticed the similarities between Sandskrit, Greek, and Latin, they speculated that Sandskrit was derived from some prehistoric, now-lost proto-language from which all of the Indo-European languages had derived.  They also inferred that the mythological story in the Rig Veda of the Indus-Valley Civilization being invaded by the arya was historically true--that it conveyed a memory of how migrants from the north and west speaking Indo-European languages had horses and chariots that allowed them to conquer the Indus Valley Civilization and spread their languages.  These Aryan invaders (perhaps distinguished by their light skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair) then migrated across much of Western Eurasia, reaching as far as the British Isles and Scandinavia.  Toward the end of the 19th century, this "Aryan Invasion Theory" was fused with anti-semitism, so that Aryans as the master race were seen as fighting against the Jews as the most powerful of the inferior races (Poliakov, 1974).

As we have seen, Hitler adopted much of this as part of his Nazi ideology.  If you look at the text of Hitler's Mein Kampf (first published in 1925), you can see that Hitler used the term "Aryan" forty-nine times.  Of the three kinds of human beings--"founders of culture, bearers of culture, and destroyers of culture"--the Aryans belonged to the first group, who subjugated the inferior races and turned their physical powers under Aryan leadership towards building great cultures.  The threat to Aryan dominance is interbreeding with inferior races so that the purity of Arian blood is lost, and that's why the Jews promote interbreeding: "The Jews were responsible for bringing negroes into the Rhineland, with the ultimate idea of bastardizing the white race which they hate and thus lowering its cultural and political level so that the Jew might dominate."

The Nazis invested heavily in archaeological projects that would show that the Germanic culture of northern Europe was responsible for most of the achievements of Western civilization.  Maps in archaeological publications from 1933 to 1945 showed the Germanic homeland as the center for the diffusion of Aryan/Endo-European culture with lines of migration to the west, south, and east.  This archaeological history was used to justify the conquest of Poland and Czechoslovakia so that "racially pure" Germans could reclaim the lands that they had originally settled thousands of years ago (Arnold, 1992).

As we have seen, ancient DNA research has now decisively refuted these ideas.  First, the "homeland" of the Aryan Endo-Europeans was not Germany but the Early Bronze Age Yamnaya culture in the center of the Great Steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas.  Second, there are no "pure" races because all human populations are genetic mixtures, including the Yamnaya population (Reich, 2018).

The elements of Nazi ideology seem diverse--racism, German nationalism, anti-Semitism, socialism, militarism, imperialistic expansionism, the "leadership principle," eugenics, and genocide. But Richard Weikart is remarkably persuasive in showing how all of these strands of Nazi ideology are woven together by the final end of Hitler's ethic--the evolutionary improvement of the human species through the triumph of the Aryan race in the struggle for existence against inferior races (Weikart, 2009).

But as I have argued, Weikart is wrong in saying that this shows a direct line of influence from Darwin and evolutionary science to Hitler.  Evolutionary science--such as ancient DNA research--has refuted Hitler's racist ethics.  And although Darwin had no understanding of genetics, he did understand that the unity of the human species--which we can now see as based on the genetic mixing in the history of the species--refutes any arguments for slavery or racism.  That's why Darwin was a life-long opponent of slavery who cheered when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

But now, as I look back over my brief summary of Hitler's racial anthropology, I am reminded of Leo Strauss's warning that it is a mistake to take the Nazi racial ideology too seriously because it is nothing more than "pedantic follies."  What really attracted the German people to Nazism was not the intellectual doctrines about Aryan supremacy but the promise that the buildup of Nazi armament and aggressive Nazi diplomacy would solve all of Germany's problems with a short and decisive war.  A Nazi victory in war would prove the real Nazi doctrine "that large scale and efficiently prepared and perpetrated crime pays."  That doctrine is "subject to the test of sense-experience"--by what we can see with our own eyes on the battlefield.  And so the defeat of the Nazis in World War II, the trial of Nazi leaders after the war for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the post-war establishment of a new liberal international order were "the refutation of the Nazi doctrine."  If might makes right, then the Nazis were proven wrong.

1939.  In 1939, Madhev Sadashive Golwalker--an Indian who was a leader of Hindu nationalism against British colonial rule--published We, or the Nationhood Defined.  Under the term "Hindutva" ("Hinduness"), which had been coined by V. D. Savarkar in 1922, Golwalker argued for the creation of an independent Hindu nation-state inhabited by a homogeneous Hindu population unified in religion and culture.  But while Savarkar had identified the Hindu race as a mixture of the Aryans who had conquered India with other peoples of the Indian subcontinent, Golwalker rejected the Aryan migration theory and insisted that the Hindus were the indigenous people of India who constituted a pure race with no mixture of Aryan blood.  From his study of Fascism and Nazism, he saw the power of a nationalism rooted in the racial purity of an indigenous people who had never been conquered by any other people (Bergunder, 2004).

This rejection of the Aryan migration theory has become a fundamental theme of the Hindu nationalism whose influence has grown beginning in the 1980s.  In 1980, the Hindu nationalist party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was founded.  And since 2014, Narendra Modi, a member of BJP, has been the Prime Minister of India.  Since 1981, Sita Ram Goel has run a publishing house named "Voice of India" that publishes books and pamphlets promoting Hindu nationalism and attacking the Aryan Invasion Theory as a threat to Hindu national identity.  Consequently, there has been an intense public debate among scholars over the "Indo-Aryan Controversy" (Bryant and Patton, 2005).  The Hindu nationalists favor an "Out of India" Theory that asserts that the Indo-Aryans originated in the Punjab region of India, that they migrated out of the Punjab, and that all the Indo-European languages originated from Sanskrit.  Contrary to the claim of the Nazis, the Aryan homeland is not in Germany but in northern India.

The fundamental problem here has been well-stated by Michael Witzel: "The search for an Indo-European homeland has taken us some two hundred years by now.  The discussion can easily be summarized, if somewhat facetiously, by: the homeland is at, or close to the homeland of the author of the book in question" (Witzel, 2019).

And yet, as I've suggested, the ancient DNA evidence indicates that the Indo-European homeland is found neither in the German nationalist homeland nor in the Hindu nationalist homeland but in the ancient Eurasian steppe homeland of the Yamnaya (Reich, 2018).

1965.  When Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, it overturned the racist national quota system of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act and thus allowed a much freer immigration process with less discrimination based on racial and national identity.  This bill was passed at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and it was seen as part of that movement towards securing the equal liberty of all human beings as including what Frederick Douglass had called "the right of migration."  President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill at the foot of the Statue of Liberty.  The ultimate aim of those behind Donald Trump's restrictive immigration and deportation policies--people like Stephen Miller--is to overturn this 1965 law and return to something like the 1924 law.

1967.  In Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Virginia's law against interracial marriage (the law that Madison Grant had supported) as an unconstitutional violation of the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause.  (And isn't this one of the most aptly named Supreme Court cases?)  As I have said in previous posts, this settled the long-running debate over whether the emancipation of slaves would allow racial interbreeding and thus deny the "purity" of the separate races.  This decision also established a general right to marriage that would later support a constitutional right to same-sex marriage (in Obergefell v. Hodges [2015]).  This also illustrates how migration necessarily leads to interbreeding and thus racial mixture.

1969.  On July 20, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first human beings to land on the Moon and then--the next day--walk on the Moon.  They were on the Moon's surface for a little over 21 hours before returning to Earth.  For the first time in history, human beings had migrated, if only briefly, from the Earth to another astronomical body.  In 1969, NASA had plans for eventually establishing a permanent settlement on the Moon and then going to Mars in the 1980s.  But since the last crewed moon landing in December of 1972, no human beings have landed on the Moon again.  

In recent years, NASA has planned to return to the Moon and then to go on to Mars and to colonize Mars, perhaps with people traveling there in Elon Musk's SpaceX "Starship."  In Trump's Second Inaugural Address, he devoted a long passage to declaring America's "Manifest Destiny" to send Americans to Mars to establish a permanent colony.  This would initiate the new era of human interplanetary migration.  

But as I have said previously, I see no evidence that Trump and his people have thought about the really hard problems for human interplanetary migration.  The deepest problem is that the universe wants to kill us.  The universe is not hospitable to life--particularly, human intelligent life.  We have not found life anywhere beyond the Earth.  And even on the Earth, we know that the Earth has been lifeless for most of its history.  The conditions in the Earth's biosphere for sustaining human life have arisen only for a few million years.  Moreover, we have to foresee that sometime in the future, the Earth will once again become lifeless.

Once we leave the Earth's biosphere, the lack of a breathable atmosphere, food, water, and protection from deadly cosmic radiation make the extraterrestrial universe a constant threat to human life.  No one knows how to create an artificial biosphere in deep space that would sustain human life for prolonged periods.  Until we know how to do that, we have to assume that Trump's American Martians will not live for long.  Most of them will probably die during their six-month trip to Mars.

1995.  The Schengen Agreement takes effect.  In the Schengen area, there is free movement between European countries (29 countries with a population of over 450 million) with no systematic border controls.  This shows that an open borders policy can work, and it's a reminder of what the world was like before World War I--a world without passports.

2020.  The COVID-19 pandemic restricts movement around the planet.  When humans migrate, infectious microbes migrate with them, which can create devastating pandemics--such as those that killed millions of American Indigenous people who had no immunity to European infectious diseases.

2025.  Ever since his first run for the Presidency in 2016, Donald Trump has promised that he would deport all illegal immigrants in the United States.  The most recent estimates indicate that there are probably over 16 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. today.  By my rough calculation, if Trump is going to deport all of these people before the end of his term, that would require deporting 11,000 people every day.  Hardly likely to happen.  But Trump's immigration bureaucracy is trying hard.  And it helps to have the Congress increasing ICE's budget by 37 billion dollars!

The ICE raids--with violent masked men detaining, punishing, and deporting people without due process of law--are teaching Americans something about immigration policy. Millions of people who have lived and worked in our communities for many years will be disappearing.  Most of them have been good Americans.  If you want to deport 16 million immigrant Americans, this is what will happen.  Are you sure this is good for the country?  Will this make America Great Again?  Or will it make America worse when all those Americans are gone?

I foresee that most Americans will decide no, this is not what we want.  And then we will have to consider an alternative immigration policy--perhaps even a policy of promoting increased immigration to reverse the harm from Trump's ICE raids.  In particular, we should consider Abraham Lincoln's proposals for increasing immigration to America by fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence to offer liberty to all those human beings who long for it.  That will be the subject for my next post.

REFERENCES

Arnold, Bettina. 1992. "The Past as Propaganda." Archaeology 45: 30-37.

Bergunder, Michael. 2004. "Contested Past: Anti-Brahmanical and Hindu Nationalist Reconstructions of Indian Prehistory." Historiographia Linguistica 31: 59-104.

Bryant, Edwin F., and Laurie L. Patton, eds. 2005. The Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History. London: Routledge.

Doyle, Don H. 2015. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. New York: Basic Books.

Goldin, Ian. 2024. The Shortest History of Migration. New York: The Experiment.

Lincoln, Abraham.  1989.  Speeches and Writings.  2 vols.  Ed. Don Fehrenbacher.  New York: Library of America.

Poliakov, Leon. 1974. The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic Ideas in Europe. New York: Barnes & Noble Books.

Reich, David. 2018. Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. New York: Pantheon Books.

Weikart, Richard. 2009. Hitler's Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Whitman, James Q. 2017. Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Witzel, Michael. 2019. "The Home of the Aryans." In Romila Thapar, Michael Witzel, Jaya Menon, Kai Friese, and Razib Khan, eds., Which of Us Are Aryans? Rethinking the Concept of Our Origins. New Delhi, India: Aleph Book Company.