Is the United States A “Nation of Immigrants?”

From the time Britain organized its first colony in North America in 1607, as well as the other twelve and British colonies in the Caribbean, British settlers in those colonies were and remained citizens of Great Britain and could travel without constraint or papers from colony to colony, from the Caribbean colonies to the North American ones and the reverse.No designation as “immigrant” existed; those British citizens in all the British colonies were called “colonists” and “settlers.” But, the blockbuster Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play, Hamilton: The Musical—based on a novelistic biography of Hamilton by Ron Chernow—was a 21st century enactment of the “nation of immigrants” nationalist ideology that had been developing since it was coined in 1958 by then-US Senator John F. Kennedy in his book by that name, becoming the framework for US history education by the 1990s. The creator of Hamilton: The Musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was born and grew up in New York of Puerto Rican parentage, presents himself as an immigrant as well, obfuscating the reality of Puerto Rico as a US colony whose residents have been US citizens by birth since 1917. Nor was Hamilton a penniless orphan; his parents had died of yellow fever, but he had a wealthy sponsor who sent him to study at Columbia University in New York City. Nothing about this narrative is about immigrants and immigrants, which raises the question of the purpose of the “nation of immigrants” mythology and what harm does it do to actual documented and undocumented immigrants today.