In the late 1770's a well-to-do French farmer who had settled in the Hudson River Valley posed a question that has fascinated every subsequent generation and reverberated through American history. "What then is the American, this new man?" asked Hector St. John de Crevecoeur in writing an affectionate sketch of his adopted country. Crevecoeur's answer elaborated a claim already advanced by another recent arrival from Europe, Tom Paine. Paine famous revolutionary pamphlet, Common Sense ( 1776), was the first stentorian call for independence from Britain. It declared, and Crevecoeur heartily agreed, that the Americans are not transplanted Englishmen. They are an intermixture of many European peoples, a nation of immigrants.

The idea that all Americans (except possibly the Indians) once were immigrants has sometimes been sharply challenged. It has not appealed to everyone. It is not, as we shall see, entirely true. It partakes rather of the rich combination of reality and myth from which national legends arise. The idea is no less important for that, no less a shaping fact of American life. For almost two centuries it has provided one standard response to a collective need for self-definition. It persists today in the meanings that cluster around the Statue of Liberty. In a posthumous work written for and attributed to President John F. Kennedy, a little book entitled A Nation of Immigrants (1964), one can find a classic statement of the legend. The ideas summarized there influence more serious scholarship as well. The best survey of American immigration characterizes it as the nation's "historic raison d'etre. . . the most persistent and the most pervasive influence in her development." Still more sweepingly, an eminent historian declared a few years ago that the immigrants were American history. An adequate description of the course and effects of immigration would require him to write the whole history of the country.

In view of such large conceptions of the matter, it is little wonder that American scholars have been hard put to specify what particular features of their national heritage derive in some distinctive way from the impact of the immigrant. In some senses, of course, immigration does ramify into every aspect of American experience. Conceived as the quintessential act of mobility, or as the starting point of the great American success story, immigration exemplifies conditions general to the whole society. But insofar as we meet it on that mythic scale--as a kind of rite de passage to an American identity--it eludes us as a historical variable. By visualizing the immigrant as the representative American, we may see him building America; we cannot see him changing it. Whatever significance immigration may have in some inclusive or representative way, it has also been a major differentiating force. It has separated those who bear the marks of foreign origin or inheritance from others who do not. The importance of immigration in this more limited sense--as a source of distinctions, divisions, and changes within the United States--remains as yet only dimly grasped. We shall have to disentangle the special effects of immigration from the encompassing legend; and that will require all the light comparative history can shed.

Let us begin with the word. In 1809 a traveler noted, "Immigrant is perhaps the only new word of which the circumstances of the United States has in any degree demanded the addition to the English language." So far as we know, the word materialized simultaneously with the creation of a national government. In 1789, Jedidiah Morse famous patriotic textbook American Geography mentioned the "many immigrants from Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and some few from France" who were living in New York. Paine, Crevecoeur, and earlier writers had referred only to "emigrants." But by 1789 our language was beginning to identify newcomers with the country they entered rather than the one they had left. Thus the term immigrant presupposed the existence of a receiving society to which the alien could attach himself. The immigrant is not, then, a colonist or settler, who creates a new society and, lays down the terms of admission for others. He is rather the bearer of a foreign culture.

Morse explicitly differentiated the "immigrants" from the "original inhabitants," the Dutch and English "settlers." The Dutch had planted in 1624 the settlement on the Hudson River that became the province of New York forty years later when it fell into the hands of the English. At the time of the American Revolution, Dutch was still spoken fairly extensively in churches and homes in New York and New Jersey. By that time people of English origin composed the preponderant element, as indeed they did in all thirteen states. The best estimate identifies as English about 60 per cent of the white population of 1790. Like the Dutch in New York, the English in all of the colonies before the Revolution conceived of themselves as founders, settlers, or planters--the formative population of those colonial societies-not as immigrants. Theirs was the polity, the language, the pattern of work and settlement, and many of the mental habits to which the immigrants would have to adjust. To distinguish immigration from other aspects of American history, we shall have to exclude the founders of a society from the category of immigrant.

The English seizure of the Dutch settlements illustrates another mode of ethnic aggregation that does not belong within the scope of immigration. It should not include peoples who are forcibly incorporated into the host society. Those groups join the society on terms that shape their subsequent experience in special ways. Americans tend to forget how many alien groups joined them involuntarily. The great American success story features the saga of the immigrant, for the immigrant chose America, attracted by the prospect of a better life. In the process of immigration the alien seeks a new country; and it encourages his aspiration. Most of the captured groups, on the other hand, do not fit the success story because their entry into the Anglo-American community did not depend on the real freedom and mobility that propelled the immigrant.

Two types of coercion have contributed to the peopling of the United States. The most obvious was slavery. The English founders imported African slaves who accounted in 1790 for about 19 per cent of the population of the new nation. Virtually from the beginning, Negroes constituted an inferior caste in the American social order. Immigrants were expected sooner or later to blend with the rest of the society or go back where they came from. But Negroes were positively forbidden assimilation, and they were unable to leave.

Meanwhile expansion and conquest engulfed many Indian tribes and other groups already established in the New World. Unlike the Negroes and the immigrants, these groups belonged to a particular place, to which they tried to cling in their encounter with the dominant American society. The Indians, after proving resistive both to assimilation and to enslavement, were driven steadily westward. Treated as foreign nations until 1871 and expected to die out, most of them became part of the United States only when they could not otherwise survive at all. With far less cruelty and destruction, the Anglo-Americans also overran various French and Spanish settlements. In 1755 they uprooted several thousand French Acadians from villages on the Bay of Fundy and dispersed them to other English colonies. Subsequent annexations took in, and left relatively undisturbed, the languid French settlements in the Illinois country, at St. Louis and, most importantly, New Orleans. As a result of the war with Mexico (1846-1848) the Anglo-Americans took possession of a considerable Spanish population in the Southwest. The "Californios" lost their patrimony and disappeared. In the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, on the other hand, the "Hispanos" still survive, ancient inhabitants of the place, proudly distinct from the "Anglos" around them and from the Mexican immigrants in adjacent states.

Altogether, the United States has participated in almost all of the processes by which a nation or empire can incorporate a variety of ethnic groups. It has acquired a diverse people by invasion and conquest, by enslavement, and by immigration. The one incorporative process America has not attempted is federation between contiguous peoples. When the individual American states federated into a single national community in 1789, the event was political and economic; it had no direct ethnic import. Elsewhere, as in Canada or Nigeria or the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, federation has given local ethnic majorities a threatening veto power against one another. In the American Union, however, the dominant group in every state sprang from approximately the same British ancestry. Union increased the variety of minorities; it did not alter the distribution of ethnic power.

After taking account of the English colonizers and their descendants, as well as the Negroes, and the more or less indigenous groups adopted in the course of expansion, what remains? Actually, a great deal. The 40 per cent of the white population of 1790 who were not English, plus the 44 million immigrants who have entered the United States since that time, have produced a very considerable part of the American people. For example, in 1920, the best authorities estimated, 15 per cent of the population of the continental United States might be ascribed to German immigration and another 10 per cent attributed to southern (i.e., Catholic) Ireland.

Yet these figures have very little meaning. The effort to assign all Americans to specific national origins was made at a time of unusual anxiety over the menace of immigration to the whole social order. Such statistics grossly exaggerate the proportion of people with any consciousness of belonging to a distinct minority. The essential fact about immigrant groups in America is their instability. They undergo steady attrition unless their cohesiveness is reinforced by powerful religious or racial peculiarities, as in the case of the Jews or the Chinese; and even then the difference in assimilation may be one of tempo or degree. In the typical process of ethnic development an increasing proportion of every generation after the first marries outside the group and ceases to be identified with it. A hard core, freshened by new immigration, can persist indefinitely. Yet the importance of the group as an ethnic minority declines sharply in the third generation and after. Those who lose meaningful contact with their immigrant origins become absorbed in the Anglo- American community; and this inflow continually widens its limits. That is why Americans have likened their society, not too inaccurately, to a melting pot. In Canada, where a more pervasive sense of ethnic separateness obtains, census takers regularly ask everyone to designate his or her ancestral nationality. The American census reflects a different set of values. It records the major racial divisions, but it has never tried to trace national origins beyond two generations--the foreign-born and their children.

We may now be in a position to correct the oversimple conception of the United States as a nation of immigrants. In addition to certain scattered indigenous groups and a hitherto segregated Negro minority, the United States has a fluctuating immigrant population and an expanding ethnic majority which I have labeled (too crudely) the Anglo- American community. That community was once predominantly English, and in times of ethnic conflict both its defenders and its critics have perceived it as "Anglo-Saxon" and exclusive. Actually, too many immigrant strains have fed into the majority group for it to regard itself consistently as anything but American.

The immigrant sector has at times been large, but not so large as in some other new countries. For example, Canada's people in 1911 were 22 per cent foreign-born. In Argentina 30 per cent of the population in 1914 was foreign-born. Foreigners outnumbered natives in some provinces of Canada and Argentina by two to one. Immigration in the United States never reached anything like those levels. At most, the proportion of the foreign-born was half as great as it was in Argentina. First- and second-generation immigrants combined never exceeded a third of the whole population.

In some states and localities at certain periods the impact of immigration has indeed been massive. At the time of the American Revolution, German stock alone comprised about a third of the population of Pennsylvania, to say nothing of the many Ulstermen in the same state from northern Ireland. At the time of the Civil War slightly more than half the population of Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis was foreign-born. At the beginning of the twentieth century 75 per cent of the people of Minnesota, 71 per cent of Wisconsin, 65 per cent of Rhode Island, 63 per cent of Massachusetts, and 65 per cent of Utah had at least one parent born outside the United States.

In a larger view, however, the sheer size of the immigrant population has been less impressive than its truly extraordinary diversity. Other immigrant-receiving countries have tended to draw disproportionately from a few favored ethnic backgrounds. In a century of immigration to Argentina, for instance, 40 per cent of the newcomers came from Italy, another 27 per cent from Spain. The same nationalities, together with a large Portuguese contingent, made up 76 per cent of Brazil's immigration. Canada, between 1851 and 1950, got almost half its immigrants from the British Isles and a quarter of the remainder from the United States. Australia too recruited overwhelmingly from the British Isles. As recently as 1947 only 11 per cent of the Australian white population was traceable to other origins. In contrast, the United States during the period 1820-1945 recruited 12 per cent of its total immigration from Italy, 13 per cent from Austria-Hungary and its successor states, 16 per cent from Germany, 10 per cent from Russia and Poland, 6 per cent from Scandinavia, and a third from the British Isles. New England sustained a major invasion of French Canadians. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans poured into the Southwest. About half a million Greeks reached the United States before World War II. Substantial concentrations of Japanese materialized in the San Francisco Bay area, of Finns in the lumber and copper towns of the Northwest, of Armenians in the orchards around Fresno, of Netherlanders in South Dakota and Michigan, of Portuguese in New Bedford, of Arabs in New York City. In some mining and mill towns one might find a dozen ethnic groups intermixed in more or less the same neighborhood. No other country has gathered its people from so many different sources.

The very diversity of the immigration makes its impact difficult to measure. In some ways diversity may have limited that impact. Where one immigrant culture predominates, it can impart its own distinctive flavor to an area and perhaps affect decisively the allocation of power. Thus Chinese immigration created a deep and lasting social cleavage in Malaya and Thailand, as East Indians did in Guiana. In Argentina, Latin immigration drastically reduced the importance of the Indian and mestizo elements. In Canada immigration has strengthened the English culture to the disadvantage of the French. But an influx as miscellaneous as that which the United States has received cannot easily alter pre-existing relationships. Competing against one another, immigrants have ordinarily found themselves on all sides of the choices America has thrust upon them. Except in relatively isolated, rural areas, no immigrant enclave--no dose-knit neighborhood or favored occupation--has been safe from invasion by some newer, less advantaged group. Employers learned to set one group against another and thus manage their labor force more easily, a policy they called "balancing nationalities." Politicians learned to rally miscellaneous support, while exploiting ethnic divisions, by a strategy known as "balancing the ticket." Accordingly, the immigrants have never been arrayed solidly against the native population on economic issues and no political party has ever captured the whole "foreign vote."

All of this is not to say that immigrants have exercised only fleeting and localized influence before melting away into America's great majority. Neither the commanding position of the majority group nor the fragmentation of the immigrants into many disunited minorities deprives them of a major role in American history. To delimit the scope of their role is rather to make possible a judgment of its distinctive import. Even so, the crux of the matter still eludes us unless--concentrating on the process of immigration--we can somehow separate what it may have made possible from what it merely reinforced. No one has yet wrestled hard with that question. But we can make a tentative start by noting that immigration occurred in two large and quite distinct phases.

Beginning in the 1680's, the English colonies in America attracted a sizable voluntary inpouring of other ethnic groups, which continued without slackening until the American Revolution. This First Immigration followed a sharp decline in English fears of overpopulation at home and a consequent falling off of English emigration. The proprietors of the newer colonies, notably Pennsylvania and Carolina, turned to foreign sources for the people essential to their promotional designs. Prior to 1680 the occasional Scot, Irishman, or Jew had left no imprint at all on the long Atlantic seaboard except in the motley Dutch town of New Amsterdam. Now advertising, the promise of religious liberty, and other inducements attracted French Huguenots, Irish Quakers, German pietists. Their coming started a wider movement--particularly from Ireland, Scotland, Switzerland, and the Rhineland--which soon acquired its own momentum. The colonies, dependent on local initiative and competing with one another for people, became so avid for immigration that their Declaration of Independence in 1776 charged the king with obstructing it.

Initially, the promise of land and the wealth it contained lured many of the 50 million people who poured out of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like the eastward migration across the Russian steppes, the overseas movement to North and South America, to Australasia, and to parts of Africa was in good part an occupation of empty land, an expansion of the Great Frontier of European settlement. Immigrants broke the soil and harvested the wheat of the Argentine pampas and the Canadian prairies; they cleared forests in southern Brazil; they dug gold in California and Australia; they spread rich farms over large parts of the American Middle West. Where they could acquire land, they took root. To a marked degree, however, the newcomers in all of the immigrant-receiving countries gravitated toward the cities. For example, 62 per cent of America's foreignborn lived in urban places in 1890, as against only 26 per cent of the native whites born of native parents. Through their concentration in and impact on the cities, the immigrants changed the countries they had come to build.

The economies of most of those countries were still quite primitive a hundred years ago. Consequently, the immigrants not only contributed the hard, casual labor that built the cities and the transportation network; they and their children also provided a very large part of the commercial, technical, clerical, and professional skills on which the cities thrived. In Argentina, for example, European immigrants may be said virtually to have created an energetic middle class in a nation that had been sharply divided between a Creole aristocracy and the apathetic mestizo masses. The United States, on the other hand, already had its own mobile middle class. What its more highly developed economy lacked was an industrial working class. The Second Immigration coincided with the industrialization of the United States and furnished the bulk of the manpower for it. Irish and French Canadians gave a tremendous impetus to the textile industry of New England; Germans, Jews, and Italians transformed the clothing industry of New York; a dozen nationalities collaborated in the blast furnaces and rolling mills of Pennsylvania and the meat-packing houses of the Middle West. In these and other enterprises, a dependence on unskilled immigrant labor encouraged the introduction of automatic machines and processes in order to standardize the task and the product. Only in America did the immigrants constitute a mass proletariat engaged in manufacturing; and because they did, America was able to develop to the full a system of mass production.

In some respects the standardized, mechanized life of the industrial city was uncongenial to the older Americans. Their heritage from the eighteenth century included a deep distrust of consolidated power. They conceived of the big city as a dangerous, corrupting place. They associated virtue with nature, and freedom with open space. They cherished ideals of individualism that seemed incompatible with the impersonal, collectivized character of the new urban world. But the foreigners, or at least their children, had to accept that world--they had to make it bearable and secure--in order to be at home in America. This they were somewhat prepared to do, for their own cultures were far less individualistic than that of the Anglo- American community. Thus the immigrants, in reaching out for a place of dignity in America, took the lead in organizing trade unions. Moreover, the long struggle to create a welfare state for the protection of the poor and the unorganized depended at every step on immigrant votes, from Hazen Pingree's reforms in Detroit in the 1890's to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.

So we come finally to a paradox in assessing the impact of immigration. In general it has enhanced the variety of American culture. We can observe its diversifying influence in the American ideal of nationality, in the American religious pattern, and in the sheer presence of so many different human types. Yet the diversities seem in the long run to give way to an irresistible pressure toward uniformity. Through the systems of mass production and mass communications, America and its immigrants have assimilated one another within an urban, technological culture that overrides all distinctions of place, class, and ethnic type.