Huddled Cliches - well worth reading

It is not only immigration reform activists who find themselves discouraged at times by the inexhaustible energy (backed by the seemingly inexhaustible funds) of the open-borders lobby. A large majority of Americans are deeply troubled by current immigration and would like to see it reduced, but they are perplexed and intimidated by the never-ending stream of clichés, myths, catch-phrases and fallacies, disseminated by the news media, the political parties, and other powerful institutions, that are used to promote it. In the following pages I will critically examine a number of these slogans from a variety of angles."

“We are a nation of immigrants.”

This—the veritable “king” of open-borders clichés—seems at first glance to be an indisputable statement, in the sense that all Americans, even including the American Indians, are either immigrants themselves or descendants of people who came here from other places. Given the above, it would be more accurate to say that we are “a nation of people descended from immigrants.”...

...it implies that anyone who is not an immigrant, or who does not identify with immigration as a key aspect of his own being, is not a “real” American...

In reality, we are not—even in a figurative sense—a nation of immigrants or even a nation of descendants of immigrants. As Chilton Williamson pointed out in The Immigration Mystique, the 80,000 mostly English and Scots-Irish settlers of colonial times, the ancestors of America’s historic Anglo-Saxon majority, had not transplanted themselves from one nation to another (which is what defines immigration), but from Britain and its territories to British colonies. They were not immigrants, but colonists...

...every nation could be called a nation of immigrants (or a nation of invaders) if you go back far enough...