The Pluralist

Perhaps it is unfair, but I often ask my undergraduate students a trick question. The question is "What country in the world, in the year 2000, had the highest proportion of foreigners living on its national territory?" It is probably no surprise that the largest number of them answer "the United States." When asked to explain, the least articulate students give the most revealing responses. They tend to report, accurately, that "everyone knows that the United States is a 'nation of immigrants.'"

Students are then surprised to learn that the correct answer to the question is not the United States but the United Arab Emirates, where 85 percent of the resident population in 2000 was foreign-born and where most foreigners worked on short-term labor contracts with the expectation they would return home again. Is the United Arab Emirates a nation of immigrants? My students do not think so, and neither do most of the leaders or natives of the United Arab Emirates. Switzerland, a country that has a longer history of importing temporary labor, today has a resident population of about 23 percent foreigners—almost twice the comparable figure for the foreign-born of the United States in 2000 (12.5 percent). Most Swiss vigorously deny they are a "nation of immigrants," while many Americans insist on it (Hoffmann-Nowotny 302). In 2005, again based on shares of population rather than numbers, the United States does not even make it into the top ten worldwide (Migration Policy Institute). Clearly, it is not just a matter of numbers.

Although unfair, my trick question is a good way to open discussion. What difference does it make if we call someone a foreigner, an immigrant, an emigrant, a migrant, a refugee, an alien, an exile, or an illegal or clandestine? To ponder this question is to explore the vastly differing ways that human population movements figure in nation-building and in the historical imagination [End Page 5] of nations. Notice, for example, that when I posed a question about foreigners, American students responded with an answer about immigrants. To confuse matters further, the foreigners that Germany counts are not necessarily foreign-born, while the foreign-born counted in the United States are not necessarily foreigners (many are naturalized citizens). By calling attention to terminology, my question encourages students to begin to compare the United States, and its proclamation of itself as a "nation of immigrants," to other nations around the world and to problematize their own comfort with words and with their national identities. It is an exercise I recommend for all who wish to engage in contemporary debates about immigrants, fences, and guest worker programs.

Even in today's highly mobile world, the United States is almost—although not quite—alone among 193 nations in calling itself a nation of immigrants. Canada and Australia also do so occasionally (Iacovetta with Draper and Ventresca; Dare). Labeling the United States as a nation of immigrants is one of several important variations on what I have called the "immigrant paradigm" of American history (Gabaccia, "Is Everywhere Nowhere?"). It is as much an assertion of national pride as a description or history of national demography. It also rests on a number of common assumptions about the past. The first is that foreigners have composed a more significant portion of the United States population or played a larger role in American national life than in other nations. Related to this is the assumption that the United States is unique in amalgamating persons of diverse cultures or origins into a single nation. Americans also like to believe that migrants have found greater success and happiness in the United States than elsewhere.

All these assumptions can, should be, and have been successfully challenged. Recent scholarship on emigration and on immigration to countries other than the United States—much of it by non-United States-based historians—suggests that the United States is but one of many nations with histories that might have produced nations of immigrants (Wang; Harzig and Hoerder; Hoerder; Lucassen and Lucassen). Most nations of the Americas, along with Australia, trace their modern histories to the...