Builders and Arrivals

A Comparative Analysis of Settlers and Immigrants, with a Focus on the United States and the Changing Character of Those Who Come to America

Defining the Terms: What a Settler Actually Is

The word “settler” has acquired, in recent academic and political usage, an almost exclusively pejorative connotation  -  as though the only thing worth saying about settlers is that they displaced indigenous populations. This framing, whatever its merits as a critique of historical injustice, obscures the defining characteristic of the settler that makes him a historically unique figure: he is a builder of civilization where none previously existed in the organized, institutional sense.

A settler, properly understood, is a person who arrives in a territory that lacks the political, legal, and social infrastructure of an established nation-state and undertakes, collectively with others, the project of creating that infrastructure from the ground up. He does not arrive to take advantage of an existing government. He arrives to become the government  -  to write the laws, clear the land, build the roads, establish the courts, found the churches and schools, and create, through sustained collective effort and often extraordinary sacrifice, the institutional conditions under which organized society can exist. This is not merely migration. It is civilizational construction.

The Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth in 1620 are perhaps the clearest American example. They arrived on a coastline that offered them no welcome, no infrastructure, and no guarantee of survival. Nearly half of them died in the first winter. Those who survived did not do so by accessing the benefits of an established society. They survived by building one  -  from the first crude shelters, to the Mayflower Compact (one of the earliest examples of self-governance in the Western Hemisphere), to the networks of trade, agriculture, and community that gradually made permanent settlement viable. Every institution they enjoyed, they created. Every right they exercised, they asserted from first principles. Every road they traveled, they cut themselves.

This pattern repeated itself across centuries and continents. The Boers who trekked into the South African interior in the 1830s, the Spanish conquistadores and missionaries who established the mission system across California and the American Southwest, the English settlers of Australia who arrived on a continent where no European legal or political order had previously existed  -  all were engaged in some version of the same fundamental project: the imposition of organized, institutional civilization on territory that, whatever its prior inhabitants, had not yet been incorporated into the framework of the nation-state and its attendant legal and political structures.

This is not to romanticize settlers or to sanitize the very real conflicts and dispossessions that accompanied settlement in many parts of the world. History is not a morality play, and honest assessment requires acknowledging that settlers sometimes treated indigenous peoples with gross injustice. But honest assessment equally requires acknowledging what the settlers actually did  -  not merely what they did to others, but what they built. The civilization that generations of immigrants subsequently arrived to benefit from was not conjured from the air. It was created, at enormous personal cost, by settlers who had no blueprint and no safety net.

Defining the Terms: What an Immigrant Actually Is

An immigrant is a fundamentally different kind of historical actor. He does not arrive in a wilderness. He arrives in a nation  -  a territory already organized under a functioning government, with established laws, institutions, infrastructure, and social norms. He does not create the political order he inhabits. He enters it, as a voluntary participant seeking the advantages it offers.

This distinction is not a disparagement of immigrants. Immigration has been, throughout American history and the history of other settler societies, a source of enormous vitality, creativity, and growth. The immigrant who arrives with skills, ambition, and a sincere commitment to participation in the life of his adoptive nation adds genuine value to the civilization he joins. But he adds that value as a participant in something already built  -  not as its original architect. The factory he works in, the court system that protects his rights, the university that educates his children, the currency in which he is paid, the roads on which he travels  -  all of these existed before he arrived, created and sustained by those who came before him.

The immigrant’s fundamental relationship to his new country is therefore one of reception and participation, whereas the settler’s was one of creation and construction. This creates different obligations, different expectations, and different measures of success. For a settler, success meant survival, endurance, and the establishment of durable institutions. For an immigrant, success means integration  -  the ability to participate fully and productively in the life of the nation he has chosen.

Throughout most of American history, immigrants understood this distinction intuitively and embraced it. They came to America because America offered something their country of origin did not  -  freedom, opportunity, legal protection, economic mobility  -  and they arrived with a corresponding sense of gratitude and obligation. They did not expect to remake America in the image of the country they had left. They came, rather, to become Americans  -  to learn the language, absorb the culture, internalize the values, and earn their place in a civilization that the settlers and their descendants had built.

The American Case: What the Settlers Built

To appreciate what subsequent immigrants arrived to receive, it is necessary to appreciate what the settlers actually created  -  because the magnitude of the inheritance shapes the moral weight of the obligation.

The American settlers did not merely clear land and build houses. They invented, largely from scratch and in real time, an entirely new model of political organization. The Mayflower Compact of 1620 established the principle of self-governance by mutual consent  -  a radical idea in a world governed almost universally by hereditary monarchy. The colonial assemblies that grew over the following 150 years developed, through practice and argument, a sophisticated tradition of representative government, common law, and the protection of individual rights that had no precise precedent in the world. When the break with Britain came, the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and subsequently the Constitution were not drawing on the traditions of any existing nation-state. They were synthesizing the best of Western political philosophy  -  Locke, Montesquieu, the English common law tradition  -  and applying it to their own hard-won experience of self-governance in a new world.

The Constitution they produced has endured, with amendments, for nearly 250 years  -  the oldest written national constitution in continuous operation in the world. The political system it established  -  with its separation of powers, its system of checks and balances, its Bill of Rights protecting individual liberties against government encroachment  -  became the template for democratic governance across the globe. The economic system that developed within its framework produced, within two centuries, the largest and most productive economy in human history. The military power that grew from it defeated fascism in Europe and the Pacific, resisted Soviet totalitarianism for four decades, and kept the sea lanes of global commerce open for the entire postwar world.

None of this was inevitable. None of it was easy. And none of it was the work of immigrants arriving to take advantage of an established order. It was the work of settlers who arrived with nothing but tools, faith, and determination, and built  -  at the cost of unimaginable hardship, and in the face of staggering odds  -  the most consequential civilization in the modern world.

This is what immigrants arrived to enter. This is the inheritance they received. And it is the measure against which their own conduct and commitment must, fairly, be assessed.

The Immigrants Who Built on the Foundation

For most of American history, the immigrants who arrived understood  -  without being told, without government programs, without mandatory curricula  -  the nature of the bargain they were entering. They came from countries where the political and economic conditions were, by the standard of America, dramatically inferior. They came from the famines of Ireland, the pogroms of Russia, the grinding poverty of southern Italy, the political repressions of Central Europe. They came because America was, manifestly and undeniably, better  -  freer, more prosperous, more just, more full of genuine possibility  -  than anything they had known or could have hoped for in the countries they left.

And because they understood that America was better, they came with gratitude. Not the performative, obligatory gratitude of someone who has been told to be grateful, but the deep, bone-level gratitude of a person who has experienced the alternative. The Irish laborer who dug the canals and built the railroads of the 19th century knew what the famine had been. The Jewish garment worker on the Lower East Side knew what the Cossacks had done in Odessa. The Polish miner in the coal towns of Pennsylvania knew what Russian imperial rule had felt like. These were not abstract historical facts to them. They were the texture of their own lives, the reason they had crossed the ocean, the measure by which they judged their new country and found it  -  despite its imperfections  -  profoundly, irreplaceably superior.

That sense of comparative perspective produced a corresponding disposition toward assimilation. These immigrants wanted to become Americans  -  not merely legally, but culturally, linguistically, and psychologically. They learned English, often at great personal effort and with painful consciousness of their own inadequacy in the new tongue. They named their children American names. They celebrated American holidays with an enthusiasm that sometimes exceeded that of the native-born. They sent their sons to fight in American wars  -  and those sons fought with a ferocity and dedication born partly from the conviction that they were fighting for a country that had given their families something no other country on earth had offered: a genuine chance.

The sociologist Milton Gordon, in his landmark 1964 study Assimilation in American Life, documented this process with precision. Gordon distinguished between different levels of assimilation  -  cultural, structural, marital, identificational  -  and noted that for most immigrant groups through the mid-20th century, the trajectory was one of progressive integration across all these dimensions over two to three generations. The first generation maintained their native language and customs in the home while learning English and American ways in public. The second generation was bicultural, comfortable in both worlds but increasingly American in primary identity. The third generation was, for practical purposes, American  -  the old-country connection reduced to heritage, food, and occasional sentiment, while the primary political, cultural, and psychological allegiance was entirely to the United States.

This was not forced assimilation in any coercive sense. No government program compelled immigrants to abandon their native cultures. The process was driven by the immigrants themselves, by their own assessment of what America offered and what it required, and by their genuine desire to belong to and participate in the civilization they had chosen.

The Transformation: When the Character of Immigration Changed

Something has changed. The change did not happen overnight, and it did not happen uniformly. But it has happened, and it is both visible and consequential, and any honest analysis of immigration in 21st-century America must confront it directly.

The immigration that has characterized much of the post-1965 era  -  and particularly the immigration of the late 20th and early 21st centuries  -  is, in significant ways, different in character from the immigration that preceded it. This is not a statement about race or national origin. It is a statement about attitude, expectation, and orientation toward the country being entered.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the national-origins quota system that had governed American immigration since 1924, was a genuine reform with genuine moral justifications. The old quota system was, in significant respects, discriminatory, and its abolition was defensible. But the 1965 Act also had unintended consequences that its architects did not fully anticipate. By shifting the primary criterion for immigration from national origin to family reunification, it created a mechanism for chain migration that dramatically increased the scale and changed the composition of immigration. By removing the preference for European immigrants that had characterized the quota system, it opened the door to large-scale immigration from regions  -  Latin America, the Caribbean, parts of Asia and the Middle East  -  where the cultural distance from American norms was, in some cases, substantially greater.

Scale matters here. The great wave of immigration from roughly 1880 to 1924 brought approximately 20 to 25 million people to the United States over four decades  -  a massive influx by any historical standard. But those immigrants arrived into an America that had strong assimilationist expectations and the institutional machinery to enforce them. Public schools were explicitly in the business of Americanization. Civic organizations, settlement houses, and neighborhood institutions existed specifically to integrate newcomers into American life. And the quota system that closed the gates in 1924  -  whatever its moral deficiencies  -  had the unintended salutary effect of giving the country a generation to absorb and assimilate the people who had arrived. By the time World War II came, the children and grandchildren of the great immigrant wave were, for the most part, unambiguously American.

The post-1965 wave has not had that breathing room. Legal and illegal immigration together have brought tens of millions of people into the United States over a period of sustained and, in recent decades, accelerating influx, into a cultural environment that, unlike the early 20th century, is deeply ambivalent about assimilation as a goal and actively hostile to the idea that immigrants should be expected to adopt American values and practices as the price of membership.

Gratitude and Its Absence

Perhaps the most striking  -  and most troubling  -  difference between the immigration of earlier eras and the immigration of recent decades is the transformation in the attitude of many immigrants toward the country they have entered.

Earlier immigrants, as described above, arrived with a comparative perspective that produced genuine gratitude. They knew, from lived experience, what they had left behind, and the comparison made America’s imperfections look manageable against the backdrop of what they had escaped. They may have complained about their wages, their working conditions, their landlords, and their bosses  -  and many of them organized vigorously for better treatment  -  but they did not, as a rule, condemn America as a uniquely evil place, a nation irredeemably stained by its history, a country unworthy of the loyalty of its inhabitants. Even the most militant labor organizers of the early 20th century  -  men and women who fought bitterly and sometimes violently for workers’ rights  -  were fighting to make America better, not to delegitimize it root and branch.

A segment of today’s immigrant population  -  and, perhaps more significantly, of the American-born children of today’s immigrants  -  operates from an entirely different premise. America is presented, in significant currents of contemporary political and academic culture, not as a flawed but fundamentally admirable civilization that has produced more human freedom and prosperity than any other in history, but as a uniquely malevolent enterprise  -  racist, imperialist, exploitative, and irredeemably corrupt. The settlers who built America are presented not as founders of civilization but as criminals. The institutions they created are presented not as remarkable achievements of human political ingenuity but as instruments of oppression.

This is a remarkable posture for someone who has chosen, voluntarily, to live in the country being condemned. A person who genuinely believed that the United States was among the most oppressive societies on earth would, logically, seek to leave it  -  or, at minimum, would not have come here in the first place. The immigrant who crosses deserts and oceans at great personal risk and expense to reach the United States, and who then describes it as uniquely horrible, has revealed, through his actions, that his words are not to be taken literally. He knows, at some level, that America is better  -  otherwise he would not be here.

But the performance of contempt for America has become, in certain communities and certain intellectual circles, a marker of political identity and moral sophistication. To express gratitude for America, to acknowledge its genuine achievements, to say plainly that it is a better country than most alternatives  -  these have become, in some quarters, signs of naivety or worse, as though only a fool or a collaborator could find anything worth defending in the civilization the settlers built. This inversion of common sense is not merely absurd. It is corrosive to the social fabric that makes a free, pluralistic society possible.

Consider what would happen to a person in many of the countries from which today’s immigrants come if they engaged in the kind of public protest, political criticism, and institutional denunciation that is not merely permitted but celebrated in the United States. In China, they would be imprisoned. In Iran, they might be executed. In Venezuela, they would be detained. In Cuba, they would disappear into the prison system. In Russia, they might fall out of a window. The freedoms that make such protest possible in America  -  freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press  -  are not natural features of the human landscape. They were created, defended, and paid for in blood by the settlers and their descendants. To exercise those freedoms in the service of condemning the civilization that created them is not merely ungrateful. It is a form of civilizational parasitism.

The Hyphenated American: Identity and Allegiance

Theodore Roosevelt, one of the most clear-eyed observers of American national identity, addressed the question of hyphenated Americanism with characteristic bluntness in a 1915 speech: “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all.”

Roosevelt was not arguing that immigrants must abandon their cultural heritage or pretend they have no history before America. He was arguing that the primary loyalty  -  the organizing political and civic identity  -  must be American, not a compound of some prior national or ethnic identity with America appended as an afterthought. The Italian-American who is first an Italian and secondarily an American is not, in any politically meaningful sense, a participant in the American project. He is a resident of America who has not yet made the fundamental commitment that citizenship requires.

The pattern Roosevelt criticized in 1915 has become substantially more pronounced in the century since. The proliferation of identity categories, the celebration of what is now called “multiculturalism,” and the academic and political infrastructure that actively encourages immigrants to maintain primary loyalty to their heritage community rather than to their adoptive nation have all combined to produce a significant population of people who are, in Roosevelt’s sense, hyphenated Americans  -  residents of the United States who have not made the primary political and psychological commitment that previous generations of immigrants made instinctively.

This is not a universal indictment of all recent immigrants. Many  -  perhaps most  -  continue in the older tradition, arriving with gratitude, learning English, working hard, raising American children, and contributing positively to the civilization they have chosen. The Vietnamese refugees who arrived after 1975, the Cuban exiles who fled Castro’s revolution, the Eastern European immigrants who came after the fall of the Soviet Union  -  many of these groups arrived with exactly the comparative perspective that produced gratitude and assimilation in earlier eras, precisely because they had experienced, firsthand, what the alternative to American freedom looked like.

But alongside these traditional immigrants, a different pattern has emerged. Large communities in which English is rarely spoken, native-country flags are displayed more prominently than American ones, native-country political loyalties are maintained and even intensified, and the host country is regarded primarily as a source of economic extraction rather than a civilizational home  -  these communities represent a departure from the historical model of immigration that built American strength, and they pose genuine questions about the long-term coherence of the American national project.

What the Settlers Built and What Immigrants Owe

The language of debt and obligation is unfashionable in contemporary discourse about immigration. To suggest that immigrants owe anything to the country that receives them  -  beyond whatever taxes and legal compliance the law requires  -  is to risk being dismissed as xenophobic or nativist. But the concept of reciprocal obligation is not a xenophobic invention. It is the foundation of any coherent social contract, and its absence is not liberation but dissolution.

Every functioning society rests on a web of mutual obligations. Citizens pay taxes that fund institutions they may never personally use. They serve on juries that decide cases in which they have no personal stake. They obey laws that restrict their freedom for the benefit of their neighbors. They send their children to serve in wars that protect interests broader than their own families. These obligations are not imposed by force alone. They are accepted  -  by people who understand that the civilization they enjoy is a collective achievement that requires collective maintenance.

An immigrant who arrives in the United States enters into this web of obligation just as surely as the native-born citizen. The difference is that the immigrant has made an affirmative choice to enter it  -  a choice that carries its own implicit commitments. To come to America is to say, by the act itself, that America offers something you want. To want something from a community is to incur an obligation to that community. The immigrant who takes the oath of citizenship explicitly acknowledges this, renouncing allegiance to foreign powers and pledging to support and defend the Constitution. That pledge is not merely a legal formality. It is a moral commitment, and it means something.

What does it mean, concretely? It means learning the language in which the civilization operates. It means understanding, at least in broad outline, the history and political principles of the country you have joined. It means participating  -  voting, paying taxes, serving on juries, contributing to the civic life of your community. It means raising children who are, first and foremost, Americans. And it means  -  this above all  -  maintaining a basic loyalty to the civilization that has received you, even while exercising your full rights as a citizen to criticize and seek to improve it.

The right to criticize is not the same as the obligation to condemn. Every healthy democracy requires vigorous debate, sharp criticism, and the perpetual questioning of its own institutions and practices. That is not what is at issue here. What is at issue is the difference between the immigrant who criticizes America because he loves it and wants it to be better, and the immigrant who condemns America because he regards it as fundamentally illegitimate  -  while continuing to enjoy its freedoms, collect its benefits, and raise his children within its borders. The first is a citizen in the fullest sense. The second is something else entirely.

Lessons from Elsewhere: Settlers and Immigrants in Global Perspective

The American experience, while the most consequential example, is not unique. The distinction between settlers and immigrants, and the varying outcomes of different immigration patterns, has played out across the globe in ways that illuminate the American case.

Australia presents a close parallel. The British settlers who arrived at Botany Bay in 1788  -  convicts, soldiers, and free settlers  -  encountered a continent that, whatever the presence of its Aboriginal inhabitants, had no European-style governmental or legal infrastructure. They built one from nothing, in conditions of extraordinary harshness, over the course of a century and a half. The Australia that emerged  -  one of the most stable, prosperous, and democratic nations on earth  -  was their creation. The immigrants who arrived in the post-World War II era  -  waves of British, Southern European, and later Asian immigrants  -  arrived to participate in this established civilization. Australia’s post-war immigration program was, by most accounts, highly successful, largely because Australia maintained explicit assimilationist expectations and managed immigration at a scale that the country could absorb without fracturing its social cohesion.

Canada offers a somewhat different and more cautionary example. Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism, adopted in 1971, was the first of its kind in the world  -  an explicit government commitment to the preservation and celebration of immigrant cultural identities rather than their assimilation into a common Canadian identity. The long-term consequences of this policy are debated, but the evidence suggests that multiculturalism as an official ideology, when combined with high immigration rates, creates real challenges for social cohesion. Surveys consistently find that Canadian-born children of immigrants in communities with strong multiculturalist traditions are less likely to identify primarily as Canadian than the equivalent second generation in countries with stronger assimilationist expectations.

Western Europe provides the most striking cautionary tale of recent decades. The large-scale importation of guest workers  -  Turks to Germany, North Africans to France, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to Britain  -  beginning in the 1950s and 1960s was predicated on the assumption that the workers would eventually return home. They did not. Their families joined them. Their communities grew. And unlike previous waves of immigration into Europe, many of these communities did not assimilate into the host societies to any significant degree. Second and third generation immigrants in France, Germany, and Britain have, in survey after survey, shown levels of identification with their heritage countries and heritage religions  -  particularly Islam  -  that exceed those of their parents, rather than declining as integration theory would predict.

The result has been the emergence of what the French political scientist Gilles Kepel called “parallel societies”  -  communities within European nations that operate by different norms, maintain different loyalties, and are, in significant respects, not integrated into the civic and political life of the nations that surround them. The terror attacks in Paris, London, Madrid, and Brussels in the 2000s and 2010s were carried out primarily by people who were not recent immigrants at all  -  they were second-generation citizens of the countries they attacked, people who had grown up in Europe and rejected European civilization in favor of an identity rooted in the heritage of their parents’ countries of origin. This is precisely the phenomenon Roosevelt was warning about in 1915  -  the hyphenated citizen whose primary loyalty is not to the civilization he inhabits.

The Indispensable Requirement: A Nation Must Know What It Is

The deepest issue underlying the comparison between settlers and immigrants  -  and the deepest challenge facing nations like the United States as they navigate high-volume immigration in a cultural environment that has lost confidence in assimilation as a goal  -  is the question of national identity itself.

A nation that does not know what it is cannot ask immigrants to become part of it, because it cannot articulate what they would be becoming. Assimilation requires a shared understanding of the core values, commitments, and identity into which newcomers are being welcomed. The settlers who built America knew what they were building. The early immigrants who arrived to participate in what the settlers had built knew what they were joining. The convergence of settler-created civilization and immigrant aspiration worked, when it worked, because both parties had a shared, if implicit, understanding of what America was and what it meant to be American.

That shared understanding has been eroding for decades, under the pressure of an academic and cultural establishment that has made the deconstruction of American national identity a central project. When professors teach that American history is primarily a story of oppression and exploitation, when school curricula treat the founding documents as instruments of power rather than achievements of political genius, when the public culture increasingly treats expressions of American pride as marks of ignorance or bad faith  -  the inevitable result is a nation that cannot make a credible case to its immigrants for why they should invest their primary loyalty in it.

The settlers who built America did not suffer from this confusion. They knew what they were building, why it mattered, and what it cost. They wrote it into their founding documents, taught it to their children, defended it with their lives, and passed it down through generations as the most precious inheritance one people can give another: a civilization worth belonging to.

The recovery of that conviction  -  the willingness to say plainly that America is, for all its faults, a remarkable and worthy civilization, that the settlers who built it deserve honor rather than contempt, and that the immigrants who come to share in it incur real obligations of gratitude and loyalty in return  -  is not nostalgia or nativism. It is the minimum requirement for the continued functioning of a free, self-governing, pluralistic society. A nation that cannot defend its own worth to those who would join it has already begun to dissolve from within.

Conclusion: Honoring the Builders, Welcoming the Arrivals

The distinction between settlers and immigrants is not a hierarchy of human worth. It is a description of two historically distinct roles in the creation and perpetuation of civilization. The settler builds. The immigrant arrives to participate in what has been built. Both can be honorable. Both can be valuable. Both have contributed to the remarkable American achievement. But they are not the same thing, and treating them as though they were the same thing produces confusion about the nature of the American national project and about the obligations that participation in it entails.

America was built by settlers of extraordinary courage, endurance, and vision. It was grown and enriched by generations of immigrants who arrived with gratitude for what the settlers had created, who learned the language and adopted the culture and raised American children and fought in American wars and contributed their talents and their labor to the ongoing project of building a more perfect union. These immigrants honored both the settlers and themselves by taking seriously the obligations of citizenship  -  by understanding that to come to America was not merely to access its benefits but to join its story.

The question confronting the United States today is whether that tradition can be revived  -  whether a nation that has grown uncertain about its own identity can recover the confidence to ask its newcomers to become, in the fullest sense, American. The answer to that question will determine, more than any specific immigration policy, whether the civilization the settlers built endures or gradually dissolves into a geographic expression with no more coherent identity than a shopping mall.

The settlers who crossed the Atlantic in the 17th century, who survived starvation and disease and conflict and isolation to build a civilization from a wilderness, deserve better than to be remembered primarily as villains. The immigrants who crossed the same ocean in the 19th and early 20th centuries, who worked themselves to exhaustion to earn a place in the civilization the settlers had built, who wept with pride when their children became Americans, deserve better than to be treated as naive assimilationists who should have known to resist the culture they were joining. And the United States of America, which has been  -  whatever its imperfections  -  the greatest engine of human freedom and prosperity in the history of the world, deserves better than to be dismissed by those who benefit most from its existence.

To honor all of these things simultaneously  -  to acknowledge what the settlers built, to celebrate the immigrants who came to build on that foundation, and to insist that those who come today incur the same obligations of gratitude and commitment that made the whole enterprise work  -  is not intolerance. It is the most American thing imaginable.