I love pieces like these (see below), the work of dedicated scholars who do the hard, granular, decades-long work of trying to understand truly complex phenomena like national identity, attitudes toward immigrants by the larger population, attitudes among immigrants themselves toward immigrants and immigration, as well as the prevalence of ideologies like the American Dream.
After the Tomás Jiménez piece, I post below, the equally provoking "The American Dream, Revised," authored by Stanford Economics professor, Ran Abramitzky. These concise articles are part of a larger Stanford Magazine special issue that you should read, as they address historical tensions about immigration dating back to 1790 and the other, a focus on the meaning of citizenship.
At the outset, none of the articles in the special issue make note of the fact that the "nation of immigrants" myth is one that consists of shared stories within not solely, "a culture," but a dominant one, at that. So when we use this phrase, scholars included, this reflects a myth that is premised on the erasure of Native Americans that wittingly or unwittingly gets reinscribed even by what we know to be excellent scholarship, which this is.
As a side note, read Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's book, Elite Capture, to unpack how it happens that dominant myths acquire unquestioned status.
This myth is so profound that it keeps us from acknowledging that from 1790 to the present is the most recent part of our history here on "Turtle Island"—the name for this continent that consists of Canada, the U.S., Mexico—and, for many, the Caribbean Islands and Greenland, as well.
When we factor in the Indigenous history of Native North America, not only did our ancestors travel freely up and down the continent, but they were also, as a consequence, intermarried and interconnected. After all, native North American tribes were mostly exogamous, meaning that they married outside their tribe, clan, or nation for purposes of strengthening alliances and promoting genetic diversity (Zion & Yazzie, 1997).
Similarly, take, for instance, the Uto-Aztecan language family, representing two Indigenous language groups, Ute and Nahuatl, that linguists like de la Cruz (2021) and Haugen (2025) know belong together. This, of course, concurs with the notion that the ancestral homeland of the Nahuatl-speaking Mexicas or Aztecs resides in what is known today as the state of Utah.
This is not a flight of fancy, but rather appears on the Disturnell map of 1847, which specifically notes "Aztlán," the Aztec's ancestral homeland, where the Colorado and Green rivers meet in Utah. This map was attached to the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. Read: Aztlanahuac: Mesoamerica in North American (April 7, 2005). The late Dr. Roberto Cintli Rodrigues is credited for bringing the Disturnell map to light.
Enough said, enjoy these illuminating short pieces.
de la Cruz, A. (2021). Introduction to Nahuatl: The Language of the Aztecs. University of New Mexico. Digital Repository.
Haugen, J. (2025). Uto-Aztecan. In S. Wichmann (Ed.), The Languages and Linguistics of Mexico and Northern Central America: A Comprehensive Guide (pp. 159-208). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Zion, J. W., & Yazzie, R. (1997). Indigenous law in North America in the wake of conquest. Boston College International and Comparative Law Review, 20, 55.
The Immigration Puzzle:Four ways to think about the path to citizenship.
Winter 2025
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| Illustration: Alex Albadree |
Photo: Do Pham/School of Humanities and Sciences/Stanford University
The Identity of a Nation
Tomás Jiménez is a professor of sociology and the founding co-director of Stanford’s Institute for Advancing Just Societies. He is also director of the Qualitative Initiative within Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab. His latest book, States of Belonging: Immigration Policies, Attitudes, and Inclusion, examines how state-level immigration policies shape belonging among Latino immigrants, U.S.-born Latinos, and U.S.-born whites in Arizona and New Mexico.
My grandfather, a migrant farm worker from Mexico, used to tell my adolescent father: “Di me con quién andas, y te diré quién eres.” Tell me who you walk with, and I’ll tell you who you are, a warning prompting my father to think twice about the company he kept. A version of that warning guides how we understand American identity in response to immigration: Show me your immigration politics and policies, and I’ll tell you what kind of nation you are. Following that guidance draws attention to big and loud events—hasty policy responses, election outcomes, and politicians’ bombastic statements—that might lead us to conclude that we are a nation of immigrants no more.
But a fuller picture comes from the perspectives of the everyday individuals who make up the nation. As a sociologist who studies how immigrant newcomers and long-established populations adjust to each other, I have spent nearly two decades observing immigration opinion data and talking with hundreds of individuals from all walks of life about how immigration shapes their understanding of American identity. My observations lead me to conclude that the idea of the nation of immigrants is a nostalgic, historically oriented view more than an aspirational future-facing perspective. For 400 years, people worldwide have come to the land that would become the United States. They and their descendants have defined what the United States has become socially, politically, and economically. These very people laud immigrants from a bygone era, as well as contemporary immigrants who are well-settled. But they are also reluctant to allow future immigrants for fear of the resulting cultural changes.
Survey and interview data highlight three traits of people’s belief in the nation of immigrants. The first is that, collectively, they are ambivalent—they like the immigrants we have had but want to limit who comes next. Data from Gallup, a survey organization, showcases the ambivalence. Majorities of Americans have accommodating views of immigrants already here: They think immigration is good for the country, are sympathetic toward undocumented immigrants, support allowing undocumented immigrants to become citizens if they meet specific requirements, and have the same view of individuals brought to the United States without legal status as children. And yet, Americans also support beefed-up border security, expanding border wall construction, and limiting the number of individuals seeking asylum on the border.
Second, taken individually, Americans’ views defy contemporary caricatures of the close-the-border-and-deport-them-all Republicans versus open-the-border-to-everyone Democrats. True, Democrats and, to a lesser degree, independents express more accommodating views, while Republicans hold more restrictive opinions. Responses to hundreds of interviews my colleagues and I gathered in the 2010s in California, Arizona, and New Mexico animate how Americans defy partisan caricatures. Self-described liberal Democrats who believed in the benefits of immigration also told us there should be some controls. For example, when asked about border security, a Latino and liberal Democrat in Arizona said: “I’m for the border security. We can’t let everybody [in].” He added, “It sucks, you know. I feel they should let them be citizens. It’s a long process but let them be here.” Republicans who favored muscular border security also expressed sympathy for undocumented immigrants, which included allowing them to legalize and even become citizens. When we asked a staunch Donald Trump supporter whether she would favor more welcoming policies in her home state of New Mexico, she said, “I would support [restrictive policies], depending on how it was done. I don’t want people rounded up. I’d like to see it done more like, if you’ve been here for a number of years and can show proof of residency and proof you’ve got a job, you should be able to walk into an office somewhere and sign up for the road to citizenship.”
Third, survey data and interviews reveal that Americans’ concerns about immigration are principally tied to cultural change, with the English language front and center. The importance of English comes from a belief in the practical need for people to share a common language and from what it shows about a commitment to being part of the nation. Beyond that, Americans leave room for immigrants to weave their cultural threads into the national fabric. Responding to a question about English-only laws, a middle-aged woman in California encapsulated the consensus: “America is not one culture; it’s not a society of people. It’s multicultural. And why should people from other countries be stripped of their culture because they are now living in America? And I think English should be the first language. And if it means you learn, you have to learn.”
It would be easy to conclude from election-year immigration politics that the United States is no longer a nation of immigrants. But that’s not quite true. According to the people who make up the nation, we are more like a nation of immigrant descendants, confident in and proud of the country’s immigration history and the contributions that immigrants and their descendants have made. With the next administration, more restrictive immigration policies are likely to further entrench that notion.
The American Dream, Revised
Professor of economics Ran Abramitzky is the senior associate dean for the social sciences in the School of Humanities & Sciences. His research is in economic history and applied microeconomics, with a focus on immigration and income inequality. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
For some readers, the phrase “streets of gold” evokes the age-old dream that immigrants can come to the United States penniless but quickly find opportunity. But my research partner, Leah Boustan, and I chose it as the title for our book for a different reason. We were inspired by the words of an unknown Italian immigrant, painted on the wall of the Ellis Island Museum, who is credited with saying, “I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I found out three things: First, the streets weren’t paved with gold; second, they weren’t paved at all; and third, I was expected to pave them.”
In Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success, we build new “big data” on millions of immigrant lives to reassess some of the common myths about immigration over the past two centuries. Think of us like curious grandchildren searching branches of their family tree online, but a million times over. We dug through genealogical websites like Ancestry.com that allow the public to search for their relatives, and developed methods to automate these searches so we could follow immigrants and their children as they moved up the economic ladder. As the unknown Italian immigrant knew all too well, we found that the “rags to riches” narrative of quick immigrant success has long been a myth. Both in the early 1900s and today, immigrants who have arrived with few skills have often continued to work in low-paying jobs throughout their lives.
In contrast, the children of immigrants have been very upwardly mobile, especially those who’ve grown up in poverty. The narrative that today’s immigrants and their families are stuck in a permanent underclass is another myth not borne by the evidence.
For example, consider what happens when we compare children raised in families with similar earnings. And let’s think about children growing up at the 25th percentile of the income distribution, which is around $31,000 a year today, roughly equivalent to two adults working full time for the federal minimum wage. What we find in this apples-to-apples comparison is striking: The children of immigrants are able to move beyond the economic position of their parents more so than the children of U.S.-born parents. This mobility advantage shows up in every historical period and from nearly every country of origin and is particularly strong for the poorest families.
Focusing on children raised in the late 1970s and early 1980s, so that they are old enough for us to capture in the data their incomes in adulthood, we find that even children of parents from very poor countries like Nigeria and Laos earn more than the children of the U.S.-born raised in similar households. The children of immigrants from Central American countries—countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, which are often demonized for contributing to the “crisis” at the southern border—move up faster than the children of the U.S.-born, landing in the middle of the pack (right next to children of immigrants from Canada).
What’s more, some of the immigrant groups that politicians accused in the late 19th and early 20th centuries of having little to contribute to the economy—the Irish, Italians, and Portuguese—actually achieved the highest rates of upward mobility. Today, the children of immigrants from Mexico and the Dominican Republic are just as upwardly mobile as the children of Swedes and Danes were 100 years ago, going from the 25th percentile to the 50th percentile. One key factor that enabled the children of immigrants to escape poor circumstances and move up the economic ladder had to do with location. Immigrant parents have tended to move to areas that offered upward mobility for everyone. In the past, this mostly meant that immigrants did not settle in the American South, a region that offered fewer economic opportunities for them. The U.S. born, by comparison, were (and are) more rooted in place.
One broad takeaway from our book to policy is that the short-term view that politicians tend to take for immigration undermines immigrants’ success. Catching up with the U.S. born might not happen for the immigrants themselves, but it does for their children. A long view of immigration policy, from the perspective of 100 years of U.S. immigration history and looking at the children of immigrants, could lead politicians to a more welcoming immigration policy that appreciates immigrants’ contributions to the U.S. economy and society.
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