AMERICANS BY MANIFEST DESTINY AND FIAT, NOT IMMIGRATION.

The old saw in American mythology is that we’re all immigrants, Not true! Not true by any stretch of the imagination. In particular, Native Americans are not immigrants—they are First Nation Americans, here before the arrival of the Europeans to the Americas. These First Nation Americans include all the indigenous peoples of the Americas before the arrival of Europeans to the American continent.

In origin, Mexicans of the conquest generation per the U.S.-Mexico War (1846-1848) were not immigrants. They became Americans by fiat opting to stay with their homeland albeit now part of the United States per the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (February 2, 1848) ratified by Mexico and the United States. How many Mexicans chose to stay with the dismembered territory of the Mexican Cession is hard to say. Some estimates like Carey McWilliams’ in North From Mexico put that figure at 75,000, rejected by Mexican American historians today who think the figure was more likely closer to 3 million.

Puerto Ricans are not immigrants. They became Americans by conquest as a result of the Spanish-American War of 1898, though legally they became Americans by the Jones Shafroth Act of 1917 signed by Woodrow Wilson. Moreover, in 1904 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Puerto Ricans could not be barred from traveling to the U.S. mainland without travel documents. Of the 8 1/2 million Puerto Ricans some 4.5 million live in the continental U.S. and are referred to as Newyoricans, though the Puerto Rican diaspora in the continental U.S. is extensive.

Overlooked until  Filipino independence in 1948, Filipinos were American citizens from 1898 until July 4, 1948, when president Truman signed the declaration of Filipino independence. Despite the fact that Spain in the Philippines was of longer duration than Spain in Mexico, Filipinos are not considered as American Hispanics, though they should be. In the 48 years of the Filipino presence in the American hegemony, as a territory then as a commonwealth (like Puerto Rico), Filipinos were considered as American citizens and not as immigrants. Technically, the Japanese invasion of the Philippines during World War II was an attack on American soil. During those 48 years of the Philippines as an American territory many Filipinos migrated to the continental United States as American citizens, not as immigrants.

As an American possession, American citizenship was conferred on Panamanians residing in the Panama Canal Zone with recognition and travel rights as American citizens. For purposes of law, all territory under the control of the federal government is considered part of the “United States.” There are a number of territories that fall under the constitutional purview of the United States, including The Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Marianna Islands. None of those populations are considered immigrants to the United States.

All in all, African Americans are not immigrants, having been brought first to the English colonies of North America and then to the United States as slaves from Africa by English settlers and slave traders. Unlike other non-immigrant groups in the United States, African Americans are more varied in origin. Though the same could be said of American Hispanics as a general group, significant clusters of Hispanics from specific Latin American nations abound in the United States, none of them larger than 1 percent of the total Hispanic population with the exception of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans.

The original Hawaiians were not immigrants though they were a motley aggregation of Pacific people. On Jul 7, 1898, President McKinley signed the INK , Newlands Resolution which annexed Hawaii to become the Territory of Hawaii. On 22 February 1900 the Hawaiian Organic Act established a territorial government with Sanford Dole, the former President of the Republic of Hawaii, appointed governor by President McKinley. The territorial legislature convened for the first time on 20 February 1901. Like Puerto Rico, Hawaii became a territory of the United States becoming a state on March 18, 1959.

There are other Americans whose ancestors were, strictly speaking, not immigrants to the United States, Americans whose forbearers were granted asylum for a number of reasons by the United States. Since 1959, for example, large numbers of Cubans were granted political asylum in the United States from Cuban communism.  Many Lao Hmong war refugees resettled in the U.S. following the communist takeover of Laos in 1975. Beginning in December of that year, the first Hmong refugees arrived in the U.S., mainly from refugee camps in Thailand and granted asylum under the Refugee Assistance Act of 1975. There are thousands of individuals—perhaps hundreds of thousands—who have been granted asylum in the United States who are not immigrants to the United States.

It may seem like a piddling argument, but the assertion that the United States is a nation of immigrants is not correct. That the United States is “a nation of nations” is more verifiable. The American people are a people from everywhere on the globe, giving credence to the song “We are the World.” Almost everywhere in the United States, we see the clustering of people from different parts of the world. That clustering is what gives American culture “sabor’—as we say in Spanish.

Nothing in this text is meant to diminish or negate the immigrant character of the United States, a character that has, indeed, burnished the image of the nation with a luster of innovation and challenge. The stamp of those great waves of German, Irish, Slav, Italian, Asian immigrants, and others to the United States is everywhere evident in the country in customs and traditions, in architecture and cuisine, in music and literature, in countless ingrained ways that go almost unnoticed.

When asked “who we are?” we don’t say “American” to each other. We say “I’m German, I’m French, I’m Irish, I’m Italian, I’m Chicano, I’m Brazilian, and so on. When explaining that I’m Mexican I emphasize that I’m mexican with a lower case “m” and American with a capital “A.” I was born in the United States. I served in the Marines during World War II in the American, Pacific, and China theaters of operation.

I’m not an immigrant. My mother’s family—the Gasca’s—are descendants of the 16 families from the Canary Islands of Spain as settlers of La Villita in 1731—the first settlement of San Antonio, Texas—who were not immigrants to the United States which did not become a nation until 1776, a few years after 1731. The Gasca’s became Americans by Manifest Destiny and fiat.

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Copyright 2013  by Dr. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca.

To contact Dr. De Ortego:  Philip.Ortego@wnmu.edu