Who are Americans?

I

We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born, and if distinctions are to be made between us they should rightly be on some other ground than indigenousness. The early colonists came over with motives no less colonial than the later. They did not come to be assimilated in an American melting-pot. They did not come to adopt the culture of the American Indian. They had not the smallest intention of "giving themselves without reservation" to the new country. They came to get freedom to live as they wanted. They came to escape from the stifling air and chaos of the old world; they came to make their fortune in a new land. They invented no new social framework. Rather they brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been accustomed. Tightly concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were conservative beyond belief. Their pioneer daring was reserved for the objective conquest of material resources. In their folkways, in their social and political institutions, they were, like every colonial people, slavishly imitative of the mother-country. So that, in spite of the "Revolution," our whole legal and political system remained more English than the English, petrified and unchanging, while in England law developed to meet the needs of the changing times.

II

If we come to find this point of view plausible, we shall have to give up the search for our native "American" culture. With the exception of the South and that New England which, like the Red Indian, seems to be passing into solemn oblivion, there is no distinctively American culture. It is apparently our lot rather to be a federation of cultures. This we have been for half a century, and the war has made it ever more evident that this is what we are destined to remain.

III

Along with dual citizenship we shall have to accept, I think, that free and mobile passage of the immigrant between America and his native land again which now arouses so much prejudice among us. We shall have to accept the immigrant's return for the same reason that we consider justified our own flitting about the earth. To stigmatize the alien who works in America for a few years and returns to his own land, only perhaps to seek American fortune again, is to think in narrow nationalistic terms. It is to ignore the cosmopolitan significance of this migration. It is to ignore the fact that the returning immigrant is often a missionary to an inferior civilization.

Trans-National America, Bourne, Randolph

Atlantic Monthly, 118 (July 1916), 86-97, 09/24/2015

As the first paragraph states, “We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born….” Everybody who is living in the United States is or come from descend of other countries, only that now the Americans label us. For example, if you are from America Central they label you as Latinos. This paragraph also mention that colonist who came to USA, they came for many reasons. Some of these were freedom and to make fortunes. About freedom, it helped them to create new laws. Freedom could help them to feel the power and to feel superiors and to feel that they were the owners of this country. However, they started to establish their own rules, they did not adapt to the Native American Indians’ rules. They established their rules, taking the advantages of having more power because of their richness and maybe that every day they were more and more. Many people who feel to have power, tend to humiliate others, it could be one of the reason to have slaves, to keep them doing what they wanted. Now, people who are coming as immigrants they have to adopt and respect the rules created for who we called Americans. When they began to stablish its own rules and decisions, it made that country started to have some limitations, and that each person who is coming to this country has to adopt to their rules and recognize that they are the Americans. About the second paragraph, I think since people contribute to this country, all people could be Americans. I think that any immigrant who come to this country come like any other, to try to get his/her dream of success as person, economic, and to reach a dream. However, the third paragraph, ‘To stigmatize the alien who works in America for a few years and returns to his own land…” This part is true. I think that new immigrants who came to USA think to return back to their countries, they do not want stay here. It not easy to leave your country, your family and maybe your culture, only because you do not have the opportunities of having a better life or facilities of living in better conditions in your countries. They do not come here to stablish new rules anymore, only to work and survive. They came here with a lot dreams which are sometimes forget because the refusal of being immigrants.