Does racial identity come first for Americans?

[fenstratpick]

I generally start with human, then American...... race does not matter to me

I wish more felt that way these days

[X14Freak]

Originally Posted by snj90

I have points of both agreement and disagreement here.

You are right about Kennedy and the fact that he was a liar and that the 1965 immigration act has been incredibly harmful and undesirable for many reasons.

The 1965 act undid the 1924 immigration act, but also abolished national origin restrictions that had existed even prior to 1924. Prior to 1924, immigration had already changed America drastically, and this in fact is what brought forth the 1924 act, which limited immigration from eastern & southern Europe and Asia, and further imposed considerable restrictions on just about every other country of origin.

I would argue the 1924 act itself was too little, too late. America had already been fundamentally transformed into a "nation of immigrants." Even a pan-European interpretation of an American identity is too broad to qualify "Americans" (in a pan-European sense) as a distinct people or nation. If pan-European immigration had been just a trickle, and the incoming population was absorbed into an American ethnicity, it would be a different story, most likely. But that's far from what happened.

Assimilation is a tricky word, because most people use it to mean adopting to a certain culture, speaking a certain language, etc. However, I find this far too superficial. Reason being, if America were a true nation, it would be about blood and soil. To be American would be to able to trace at least a good part of your ancestry to colonial settlement. If you can't do that, then you've got no blood-bond with your fellow Americans, so the "nation" is not a truly distinctive people, but still an artificial entity.

Another point of disagreement is your contention that pre-1965 arrivals put "national" identity ahead of ethnic identity. That's completely at odds with reality, which is that the majority of white Americans whose ancestors immigrated to the country during the approximately 100 years before the passing of the 1965 immigration act, do in fact tend to maintain an ethnic identity. You have Italians, Germans, Scandinavians, Jews, Eastern Europeans, Irish folks, etc. These identities are still alive, and the tendency to identify with ethnic identity has been long noted, perhaps most famously by Teddy Roosevelt, who proclaimed that there must be no hyphenated Americanism. However, getting all these people with no roots in the land to jettison their previous ethnic identities was, and remains, a fantasy. American exceptionalists still get their panties in a twist about folks identifying with their ancestors rather than the supposed virtues of the propositional American identity that they love to trumpet.

That 1965 Act was necessary to convince Asians (Middle East/South/East), Africans, and Latin Americans that the US could be trusted not to be racist towards them and will treat them as equals in an international setting. The Soviets were spreading a lot of propaganda that showed that the US was a fundamentally racist state and that non-whites would never be treated as equal by the US. The US decided to counteract this by repealing the 1924 Act and also by passing the Civil Rights Act. This was one of the main reasons why the Republicans were so supportive of the civil rights legislation's in the 60s since they viewed it as an effective tool to combat communism in the Third World. A lot of countries like South Korea, Mexico, and India have also asked the US for looser immigration laws in exchange for access to their markets and the US was more than willing to comply.