What the Debates over American Heritage Are Really About

By Matthew X. Wilson

Thursday, January 01, 2026

 

Responding to internet-driven debates of late over American identity and what it means to be an American, John R. Puri recently published a vigorous criticism of arguments that “Americanness” has any specific genetic, ethnic, or historical component to it. “American heritage has never been static — a closed system incompatible with newcomers,” he writes. “There exists no American culture that preceded American immigrants.”

 

Later, he observes that American history has been marked by periodically high waves of immigration. Puri writes:

 

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?

 

As John’s focus on immigration implicitly acknowledges, fights over concepts such as “Heritage American” as well as esoteric debates over the wars someone’s ancestors must have fought in for one to be considered American are, at bottom, not really about those things.

 

While some online activists really do advocate for sectarian ethnic conceptions of American identity, the underlying conflict at hand in these debates is over immigration. Should immigration levels be expanded, maintained, or curtailed? Is immigration into the United States, as a broad matter, a net positive for the country today? Can anyone really become an American? Are some cultures, beliefs, and practices better suited for integration into America than others, or are all cultures equal — and thus everyone in the world, in principle, equally suited for migration to the United States? These are the relevant questions at play, not how much Scots-Irish blood one must have to be a real American.

 

Such questions about immigration are highly charged and difficult ones, since they necessarily involve what are at times zero-sum calculations of identity, belonging, and, yes, Americanness. But they are not mean-spirited questions, derived from a vulgar prejudice or designed to exclude for exclusion’s sake. They are, rather, urgent questions no matter how much the left-wing media want to obstruct the much-needed discussion over whether large-scale immigration is sustainable.

 

There are those who do defend the proposition that anyone in the world can become an American, and who argue our country’s immigration policies should not show partiality based on factors such as cultural compatibility or the prospect of assimilation. But this, I believe, is a wrongheaded view, one that, if effectuated through the continued promotion of historically high levels of migration, would push the United States further toward the ethno-religious balkanization now being experienced by countries such as Britain and France.

 

As the examples of Western European nations have made clear, the consequences of the mass migration of culturally antagonistic peoples include increased public disorder and anti-social behavior, the collapse of social trust, and the creation, as Reihan Salam describes it, of a “permanent underclass” of low-wage, low-skilled, foreign-born populations. (If you doubt Salam’s assessment, pay a visit to British cities such as Birmingham, Luton, and Bradford.)

 

Large-scale migration of unassimilable masses also results in the gradual fraying of the shared cultural fabric that, at the community level, ultimately binds and unites us, at least as much as any proposition or document — important and rightly cherished as those propositions and documents are.

 

A 2013 Pew survey found that high numbers of Muslims in many Muslim-majority countries supported executing persons who apostatize from Islam. Ninety-nine percent of Afghan Muslims supported making sharia the law of the land, and of that group, 79 percent backed the death penalty for apostasy; 84 percent of Pakistani Muslims similarly sought a sharia state, with 76 percent of that group in favor of killing those who leave Islam.

 

Can such people ever truly become “American”?

 

While Ellis Island is indeed an important symbol, we cannot ignore the 40 years of a near-total moratorium that followed the overwhelming immigration waves of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

 

After decades of record immigration levels (since superseded in scope by the Bidenwave), Congress passed, near-unanimously and under intense public pressure, the Emergency Quota Act in 1921, dramatically curtailing immigration by enacting a temporary national origin–based quota system until a longer-term solution could be devised. The bill was quickly signed into law by Warren G. Harding. Three years later, Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924, which made the Emergency Quota Act’s reforms permanent — largely banning immigration into the United States from non-European countries and severely restricting European immigration. The system set in place in 1924 remained mostly intact until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which, together with the Immigration Act of 1990, inaugurated our modern liberalized immigration regime.

 

The data show the decisive impact that 20th century immigration limits had, and what the lack of sufficient controls has done to the country today. In 1890, the foreign-born share of America’s population stood at 14.8 percent. In 1970, after more than four decades of restrictions, the foreign-born proportion had settled to 4.7 percent. By January 2025, following 60 years of liberal immigration policy, that figure stood at a record 15.8 percent.

 

Large waves of immigration are part of American history, but so too are extended periods of little-to-no immigration, giving American society the breathing room necessary to properly integrate and assimilate those we have taken in.

 

Describing his position on American identity and immigration to Congress in his 1923 State of the Union address, Coolidge said,

 

American institutions rest solely on good citizenship. They were created by people who had a background of self-government. New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship. America must be kept American. For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration. It would be well to make such immigration of a selective nature with some inspection at the source, and based either on a prior census or upon the record of naturalization. Either method would insure the admission of those with the largest capacity and best intention of becoming citizens. I am convinced that our present economic and social conditions warrant a limitation of those to be admitted. We should find additional safety in a law requiring the immediate registration of all aliens. Those who do not want to be partakers of the American spirit ought not to settle in America.

 

Following the example of Coolidge, one of our nation’s most faithfully conservative presidents, we must not let ourselves be deceived into believing that being an American requires little more than outward assent to a list of ideals or propositions, or that we cannot have principled objections to high levels of immigration rooted in our concern for culture, the economy, our history, and social stability.

 

There are easily identifiable traits and habits from which the Americanization and Americanness of a person who lives in the United States can be assessed. For instance:

 

Does he speak primarily English in his daily life?

 

Does he live and socialize among mostly native-born Americans, or in a self-segregated parallel community?

 

Does he display in-group preferences toward his ethno-immigrant group?

 

Does he maintain interest or involvement in his homeland’s ethnic, religious, or political conflicts?

 

Is he recognizably American in his lifestyle and habits? Does he have reverence for American traditions, history, and culture, or does he reject, mock, and attack our heritage?

 

The progressive Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, a son of immigrants himself, offered a powerful description of authentic Americanization in a 1915 Independence Day address:

 

To become Americanized, the change wrought must be fundamental. However great his outward conformity, the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here. And we properly demand of the immigrant even more than this. He must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. Only when this has been done, will he possess the national consciousness of an American.

 

American identity does have cultural preconditions that are more than simply creedal. And the heritage debate itself — what it means to be an American — will ultimately be resolved not online, but within the context of American immigration policy.