A Nation of Immigrant Nativists
Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled Masses, and Make Them Great Again

Donald Trump, primed to make America great again (again), is the son of a Scottish immigrant, the grandson of German immigrants, and the husband of a Slovenian immigrant. His most influential advisor, mega-MAGA-capitalist Elon Musk, was born in South Africa. And even JD Vance, though proud of his deep Appalachian roots, is married to an Indian-American woman and has a son named Vivek. American nativism, then, has its internal tensions, as illustrated by the MAGA civil (flame) war of Christmas 2024. On one side, the tech right: opponents of illegal immigration but proponents of skilled legal immigration. On the other side, the Luddite right, who, at their most radical, oppose immigration tout court.1 Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, son of Indian immigrants, are among the most vocal proponents of the tech position. But the Luddites didn’t exactly emerge straight off the Mayflower, either. Representative voices include Irish-American Stephen Bannon and Jewish-American Laura Loomer. On the explicitly racist right, there’s Nick Fuentes, whose Spanish surname means “fountains,” and Kanye West, who probably does have the deepest American roots of the lot.
Of course, you can be an immigrant, or descend from immigrants, and support restrictions on immigration. The 2024 election results, which saw nearly half of Latino voters support Trump’s America-First messaging, rather proves this point. But radical nativists want to make his victory unrepeatable by reducing the definition of “American” to as small a group as possible. A Substack post titled Blame Immigrants makes the subtext explicit: “there is only one group indisputably tied to these United States: white men, defined by their British ancestry, English liberalism, and common law traditions. Everyone else was welcomed in. They did not inherit it. Their family’s [sic] did not build it.” Again, by this criteria, Trump himself (whose mother, while British, only naturalized in 1942) is disputably American, as is much of the MAGA right. By virtue of his family, Vance is presumably a race traitor and, as a Catholic convert, a heretic as well (it’s unclear why the author didn’t include Protestantism in his list of ur-American qualities2). To the chagrin of his Irish refugee ancestors, Bannon might be grouped in as “British,” but something tells me that Jews like Loomer and Mexicans like Fuentes will have a hard time making it through the coalition-whittling process.3
To be American is to be part of a people, not merely to subscribe to a creed. But from the founding onward, members of other peoples have been invited to join the American nation. The founders were of British stock and influenced by British liberalism and common law. But they were also men of the Enlightenment, indebted to the Classical and Biblical traditions. As such, they advocated a more expansive definition of national belonging.4 Per Alexander Hamilton, the “advantage of encouraging foreigners was obvious and admitted” and “persons in Europe of moderate fortunes will be fond of coming here where they will be on a level with the first Citizens.” For Benjamin Franklin, “When foreigners after looking about for some other Country in which they can obtain more happiness, give a preference to ours, it is a proof of attachment which ought to excite our confidence and affection.” George Washington “had always hoped that this land might become a safe & agreeable Asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.” And the Declaration of Independence itself complained that the British monarch “endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither . . .” No other nation’s founding documents call for increased immigration.
Accordingly, in 1776, the population of the newly United States was 2.5 million. By 1900, it was 76.3 million, of which 14% were born in other countries. Notably, however, America enacted immigration restrictions in the 1920s, which resulted in a decline in the foreign-born population. Following legal changes, that number began rising again in the 1970s and, through ebbs and flows, reached a record 15% under President Biden in 2023. Trump’s reelection is certain to result in new restrictions, demonstrating that while America, from its founding, has welcomed immigrants, that welcome has its limits. The question, then, is over the extent of those limits. After all, Thomas Jefferson advocated for refugees (“Shall we refuse the unhappy fugitives from distress that hospitality which the savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this land? Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe?”), but also questioned mass immigration: “In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its directions, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”5 Tyler Cowen calls the tech-right compromise—openness to highly skilled immigrants, restrictions on the less skilled—the “intermediate position.” He worries that the intermediate position is untenable because the general public isn’t prone to fine distinctions. They’re either sympathetic or hostile to foreigners in general. Perhaps he’s right, or perhaps the wrong distinction is being emphasized. Instead of skill, which is narrowly economic, why not look at immigration through the lens of benefit to the nation?
As James Madison put it, “we should hold out as many inducements as possible, for the worthy part of mankind to come and settle amongst us,” not “merely to swell the catalogue of people” but to “increase the wealth and strength of the community.” Of course, wealth and strength of the community overlap. So do economic and national success (or “greatness,” if you will). But they are not coterminous. For example, Joseph Henrich traces the West’s prosperity to its WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) psychology, which is unusually individualistic, self-focused, control-oriented, non-conformist, and analytical. This WEIRD psychology is a result of the Catholic Church’s abolition of cousin marriage and polygyny, and the consequent decline of European kinship networks. Henrich finds that even second-generation immigrants from non-WEIRD countries are "more conformist-obedient, less individualistic-independent, and less inclined to trust or expect fair treatment from strangers.” These differences persist because “migrants often re-create the intensive kin-based institutions found in their countries of origin” and are influenced by their families and migrant communities.6 Thus significant non-WEIRD immigration can alter a national (and, in the case of work visas, company) culture, regardless of economic benefits. And, because culture influences economics—and the West owes its success to WEIRD psychology—even those benefits may ultimately prove transient.
On the other hand, the West’s success—and certainly America’s—was accelerated by skilled immigration. In Europe, as Henrich notes, “Every time a king, guild, university, or religious community cracked down on some economically productive individuals or innovative groups, it lost in competition to its more tolerant and open counterparts.”7 And in the Americas, as historian David Landes recounts, the Spanish crown tried to keep “outsiders away from its possessions in the New World,” which “deprived the empire of badly needed skills and knowledge.” By contrast, British colonists welcomed talented newcomers because they “came out of a society of dissent, moderately open to strangers and new ideas.”8 Yes, a society of dissent, but also of cohesion. For Landes, a key reason why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain first is that “Britain had the early advantage of being a nation. . . . a self-conscious, self-aware unit characterized by common identity and loyalty and by equality of civil status. Nations can reconcile social purpose with individual aspirations and initiatives and enhance performance by their collective synergy.”9 Successful nations must be moderately open to new ideas and strangers, but not so open that they fray the common ties that make them nations in the first place.10 While Trump famously promised to build a “big, beautiful wall” barring illegal immigrants, he also promised it would have a “big, beautiful door” for legal entry. We’ll see how wide it swings.
The more nuanced position is that America should have limited, highly skilled immigration, but that the H1-B program is riddled with abuses and does not effectively serve this purpose.
I’d wager it’s because the author is an atheist or “cultural Christian” at best, and so is selective in choosing which qualities of the founders to emphasize. Thus anti-Catholic sentiments like Samuel Adams’ “I did verily believe, as I do still, that much more is to be dreaded from the growth of Popery in America than from the Stamp Act or any other Acts destructive of civil rights” are memory-holed.
Loomer and Fuentes should be whittled from any winning coalition, but not because of their ancestry.
How expansive is a question that has been debated (and, in the case of slavery, fought over) through the centuries. But it is revisionist history to suggest that the founders opposed immigration (just as it is revisionist history to suggest that they favored “open borders”).
Yet Jefferson was clearly a proto–tech bro: “I mean not that these doubts should be extended to the importation of useful artificers. The policy of that measure depends on very different considerations. Spare no expense in obtaining them.” Obviously, Indian software engineers were not top of his mind when writing in 1782. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was, in his words, “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo [emphasis mine] and infidel of every denomination.”
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (2020), 243–244. That is not to say these differences last forever; WEIRD people, after all, were not always WEIRD. But assimilation takes time (and will, both on the part of the immigrant and on society).
Henrich, 460. He cites the example of the Protestant Huguenots, who fled persecution in Catholic France for Britain, Holland, and other countries. Among the innovators France lost was Denis Papin, who contributed to the development of the steam engine in Britain.
David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (1999), 311–312.
Landes, 219.
Per political scientist Kevin Portteus, this is in line with the founders, whose “general position on immigration was one of assimilation, facilitated by dispersion of immigrants among the general population and adoption of the English language.”
Bigotry is not a rational ideology, so MAGA is just fine with the tension of hating immigrants while love billionaire immigrants that enable their hate.