America’s current preoccupation with attacking and deporting legally residing immigrants and naturalized citizens is a grotesque spectacle. The nation is now eating itself, driven by a supremacist and xenophobic mindset that cannot abide the truth of its own heritage. Ethical censure, not celebration, is what the United States has earned in recent years, as it enacts policies and cultivates attitudes betraying not only its founding promises but also the very mechanism of its historical rise.
The Braid of Freedom: Liberty, Equality, Democracy
The American concept of freedom, frequently referenced in political philosophy and founding documents, is built on three critical elements: liberty, equality, and democracy. Liberty promises the right to act freely. Equality demands the law treat all without distinction. Democracy is the mechanism through which the governed retain power and hold leadership accountable. Each aspect is now under aggressive attack, especially for immigrants and their descendants, by an administration and federal apparatus bent on exclusion rooted in supremacist and fascist ideology.
The Myth of American Exceptionalism: A Fabrication for Supremacists
Make no mistake: American exceptionalism is a fiction, sustained by self-congratulatory propaganda and historical revisionism. Daniel T. Rodgers, a distinguished historian, unmasks this myth and exposes its white-supremacist underpinnings. The exceptionalist narrative has always provided ideological cover for interventions abroad and oppression at home, especially directed at minorities and immigrants. This creed, forged by a dialectic of American historiography, exists to reinforce the notion of national superiority and the right to exclude.
As Andranik Migranyan clarifies, exceptionalist myths are common and not unique to the United States. The Romans, Russians, Greeks, and British all fostered their own versions. America’s mythology, now dangerously divorced from reality, persists even as its institutions struggle under the strains of inequality, decreased social mobility, and mounting dysfunction. The more broken the system becomes, the louder its defenders chant the mantra of exceptionalism, becoming ever more angry and desperate.
Immigrants: The Architects of American Industry
The true story, the one American ideologues desperately conceal, is that the nation’s industrial might, its rise to global dominance, and every meaningful innovation are owed directly to the labor and creative intellect of immigrants and workers.
Between 1820 and 1920, during the so-called ‘melting pot’ era, over 33 million people entered the United States. Immigrants and their children formed up to 40% of the white population by 1920, and this demographic surge enabled the rapid growth and spread of factory production throughout the country. The shift from artisanal workshops to large factories was catalyzed by the growing supply of unskilled immigrant labor. The diversity of this population expanded the potential for division of labor, economic innovation, and urban growth.
Counties with higher immigrant populations saw not just larger and more productive factories but also higher wages and increased urbanization. This is not folklore; it is empirical fact, demonstrated across historical, economic, and demographic records. American manufacturing, the engine of the nation’s ascendance, was inseparable from immigrant labor and the diversity it produced.
The Self-Destructive Assault on Freedom
Today, these communities—the indispensable engines of American prosperity—find themselves targeted by a predatory, constitutionally hostile state and federal government. Attacks on immigrants are attacks on the American labor force itself, amounting to a willing sabotage of the nation’s economic and civic resilience. Nothing could be more antithetical to the promises of liberty, equality, and democracy. The exceptionalist impulse, once a convenient myth for expanding American power, now turns inward to enable self-destruction, seeking purity where none ever existed and erasing diversity that always proved necessary.
Ethical Admonishment: A Nation Eating Its Own Roots
America cannot claim greatness by relying on immigrants and workers, and then dismiss those same people with contempt and violence. There is no valor in a heritage of stolen opportunity, nor any freedom in a system sustained by exclusion and fear. The myth of exceptionalism has always functioned as a tool for oppression, and now threatens to destroy the very society it claimed to uplift.
Your greatness, if it ever existed, was borrowed from the hands of the immigrant and the laborer. If the nation continues this supremacist descent, history will record not valor or might, but a bitter and unsparing verdict. In pursuing purity, America has chosen self-annihilation.
References
Migranyan, A. (2013, July 31). The Myth of American Exceptionalism. The National Interest. https://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-myth-american-exceptionalism-9223
Rodgers, D. T. (2021, September 20). The Myth of American Exceptionalism: From the Beginning. Toward Freedom. https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/americas/the-myth-of-american-exceptionalism-from-the-beginning/
Kim, S. (2007). Immigration, Industrial Revolution and Urban Growth in the United States, 1820-1920: Factor Endowments, Technology and Geography. National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w12900/w12900.pdf