What Is the American Heritage?

By John R. Puri

Thursday, December 25, 2025

 

A well-traveled friend made a wonderful observation a couple of years ago. In America, she noted, the question “What are you?” is a normal conversation starter. People know what you mean when you ask it: What is your lineage? “What are you” on your mother’s side versus your father’s? Americans know you aren’t inquiring about their nationality — that’s a given.

 

The Europeans my friend had met, however, found this question odd and ridiculous when she asked them. “We’re in Munich, aren’t we? What do you think I am?”

 

Many on the political right are now preoccupied with a similar, though much weightier, question: What are Americans? For many nationalists, one’s degree of Americanness depends on genetic lineage. Were your ancestors around during the Founding? Did they fight in the Civil War? If so, you are supposedly more of an American than someone who naturalized last week, or even someone whose ancestors arrived in the past 150 years or so. You are what online provocateurs call a “heritage American,” higher in status than those who are mere nominal Americans.

 

This is an attractive concept to nationalists who insist on protecting America’s character from external threats, especially immigration. To their minds, national heritage is a sacred elixir that cannot be safely added to, only diluted. “Heritage Americanism” also fits the logic of a nativist program. If first-generation immigrants are not fully American, their children and grandchildren must not be, either.

 

Their conception of the nation is wrong, however. American heritage has never been static — a closed system incompatible with newcomers. Rather, it has always been distinguished by openness and dynamism, by the simultaneous assimilation and evolution that new arrivals undergo and bring about.

 

Conservatives tend to scoff when liberals say that America is a “nation of immigrants,” because progressives often use that sentiment to decry any lawful restriction on migration. But, of course, America is a nation of immigrants and their descendants. Unless you’re Native American, none of your ancestors were here a thousand years ago. At least two of them had to get on a boat or a plane and come over at some point, leaving another place they formerly called home. Accordingly, there exists no American culture that preceded American immigrants.

 

The first English settlement in America, Jamestown, was founded by what we now call economic migrants, seeking profit in a bountiful new world. The second settlement, Plymouth, was built by refugees — Puritans escaping legal persecution because of their divergent faith. They were distinctly English, yes, but also distinctly their own.

 

Most Europeans who came to the Thirteen Colonies between 1630 and the Revolution came as indentured servants. They were usually destitute, willing to surrender their freedom for many years for a chance at someday acquiring land. Before the war, Americans complained that England was dumping its wretched refuse on the colonies — shipping over tens of thousands of prisoners, vagrants, and other undesirables. But those miscreants soon became Americans, too. So-called heritage Americans can claim many of them as their ancestors. By the Founding era, just three-fifths of the white population in America was of English descent. The rest were of Scottish, Irish, Dutch, French, German, Swedish, or other origin. Hundreds of thousands more had been brought from Africa. America was then the most ethnically and religiously diverse republic the world had ever seen. It remains so today.

 

The framers of the Constitution drafted the document to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” They also knew that the American posterity would include many newcomers. The Constitution authorized Congress to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization” for future citizens. No one was more concerned with sustaining the nation’s republican character than the patriots in Philadelphia. It is therefore interesting that they specified how immigrants could become the people’s representatives in Congress after a certain number of years as naturalized citizens — less than a decade. An amendment to increase the wait time to 14 years was voted down at the Constitutional Convention.

 

The largest single-decade increase in the percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign-born took place from 1845 to 1855. In the Civil War, roughly a quarter of soldiers in the Union army were foreign-born, and another fifth were the sons of immigrants. Confederate generals learned to fear the Irish. Abraham Lincoln’s administration printed recruiting posters in foreign languages, and the Homestead Act that Lincoln signed in 1862 was publicized to attract immigrant settlers. Of the 800,000 who arrived during the war, about 180,000 served. One of my grandmother’s ancestors, hailing from Switzerland, obtained his U.S. citizenship by fighting for the Union.

 

Large-scale immigration continued from the 19th century into the 20th, interrupted just for a few decades by stringent laws before resuming. Immigrants arrived increasingly from unfamiliar places like Italy, Russia, and Poland. Later, from Asia and Latin America. Today’s nationalists claim to preserve America’s history and institutions. Does Ellis Island not count among them?

 

America’s nationhood, to self-proclaimed nationalists, is just like that of a European country. Bloodline is everything. But American blood has never not been a mixture, because immigration has never not been a part of the American story. There is nothing here to keep “pure,” besides our defining impurity.

 

Despite their mistaking it for a fiction, the nationalists are correct that there is such a thing as a distinct American heritage. I believe that I share in it.

 

When I was a child, my family discovered that Davy Crockett, the legendary frontiersman, was a distant relative of ours. What could be more American than that heritage? Well, David Crockett’s ancestors were persecuted French Huguenots who had fled to Ireland before landing in the States. Indeed, what could be more American than that?

 

I have a curious last name for a white guy for a reason. My father’s father arrived from India in the 1960s. He married a Jewish woman he had met at college, whose family had migrated from Eastern Europe. Their son married a girl whose mother’s ancestors were Swiss and German, and whose father’s ancestors were English and Welsh. Together, they had me: John Raj Puri.

 

Tell me, what other country could I have conceivably come from, if not America?