The United States of America, we are told, is a “nation of immigrants.” The values of freedom and liberty may form the foundation of America, many people say, but that foundation was built, and is continually changed and renewed, by the immigrants who have come here through the centuries to find Liberty and to pursue Happiness. Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York told us that America was “born in the streets” of ethnic conflict in the 19th century. The Irish rock band, U2, reminded us (in their theme song for that movie) that immigrants of all stripes were “The Hands that Built America.”

I must respectfully disagree.

The foundation of America and American society is not the myriad immigrants who have sought refuge or a new life in the US, nor is it even the cherished values of freedom and liberty which America spread around the globe. The foundation of American society is the Anglo-Celtic people and culture, and a broad (and vaguely Protestant) type of Christianity. The ideals of freedom and liberty are vitally important to American society. I believe they originally reached their highest expression in America. And it cannot be denied that immigrants have affected and changed the US in countless ways (both for good and ill). But there was a set culture in place for immigrants to join themselves to when they arrived. And there was a social framework around which the virtues espoused by Thomas Jefferson – Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – could develop into their distinctly American form. But if you’d taken away the English and Scotch-Irish people who originally created that culture and that framework you’d have had nothing for immigrants to join, nor would you have had anything around which to develop the kinds of virtues that we call “American.” Many immigrants came to America, and we are their sons and daughters, but that does not make us a nation of immigrants. It makes us a nation of the children of immigrants. This may not seem like a meaningful distinction, but a closer look shows that it is vitally important.

The Founders explicitly incorporated the notions of freedom and liberty into the nation they created. That nation, however, was built on the peoples of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the cultural traditions and social practices of the English and Scotch-Irish settlers and (to an extent only realized two centuries later) African slaves. Take away those peoples or traditions – the English common law, for instance, or the Protestant work ethic, or the thrift and the fierce independence of the Scotch-Irish – and “America” would never have existed. There might have been another nation (or other nations) in the middle of North America, but it would not have been the USA. It would be like removing Islam from the nations of the Middle East (other than Israel, of course) – it would so alter them as to make them completely different countries, to make them cease to exist.

This is certainly a controversial argument. Some might even call it racist, since it privileges the historical contributions of White Anglo-Celtic Protestants over those of other peoples. To many people, America doesn’t even have a distinct culture, moral traditions, or ethnic identity: America is a melting pot, made up of countless races and religions. America is not about the English or the Scots at all, and it’s certainly not about Christianity. What America is really about is “freedom,” or “liberty,” or “tolerance,” or even “human rights.”

There’s a big problem with this line of thinking, however. It’s fundamentally no different from saying that America is just an idea, a state of mind. It’s like the popular saying that “Christmas is a state of mind” (i.e. that Christmas is really about treating other people well and being a good person, and is not about the birth of Jesus) and that “every day can be Christmas if we want it to be.” But if every day is Christmas then “Christmas” is no longer a holiday celebrating Christ’s birth and ceases to have any special meaning. It just means “today.” Likewise, if America is just a bunch of values and is not a particular nation in North America made up of a particular culture forged by a particular people (Protestant, Anglo-Celtic settlers), then “America” just becomes “that piece of land between Canada and Mexico” – or maybe even less. After all, we don’t need a nation to promote “American” values. The whole bit about having an actual nation-state becomes unnecessary. We can have “America” in Iraq or in Afghanistan or in Zimbabwe or anywhere.

What’s funny is that most people accept this argument when the relationship is reversed. We often hear how America’s cultural imperialism – our spreading the gospel of Wal-Mart and McDonalds to the four corners of the earth – is supplanting and destroying native cultures around the globe. And the “ugly American,” the American who travels or moves to another country but refuses to change his behavior to adapt to that country’s culture, is a well-known cliché of world travel. It is accepted that other countries have peoples and cultures that were there before Americans arrived, which Americans must respect, and to which they must do their best to adapt. My parents experienced this responsibility to respect and adapt to another culture during their year in France. My wife and I have experienced it for over nine months in South Korea. We accepted that responsibility, however, because those cultures existed before we arrived. We joined them. They were forged by distinct peoples thousands of years ago. If their distinct cultures hadn’t existed, there would have been no reason to go there. Going to “Korea” or “France” would just have meant going to a place, like Antarctica: a new experience, perhaps, but one devoid of much significance beyond just physically being there.

It’s the same with America. If nations like Korea or France have their own distinct cultures, it stands to reason that America is its own nation with its own culture in a way no different from them. People of a distinct race – the white, Anglo-Celtic race – forged it hundreds of years ago. The people who came to the US (willingly or not) after that culture was formed certainly added to it. But there was a culture already in place for them to join. They didn’t create the society, like founding members of a club. They joined it, like athletes being drafted by professional teams. Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera have been crucial members of the New York Yankees for several years, but they are not the Yankees. The Yankees existed before them. There was an organization already in place to which they joined themselves when they joined the team. My ancestors who came over from Ireland in the 19th century – and the ancestors of virtually all Americans – were no different.

A “nation of immigrants,” then, is a contradiction in terms. If a nation has only immigrants with no culturally native members then it does not exist, any more than a club can be said to have members if it has not yet been formed. If, however, a culture already exists for the immigrants to join themselves to, then that culture was forged by others and the nation was not built by immigrants. Immigrants join themselves to the already-existing culture and their children grow up in it and consider it their native land – and that nation is not one of immigrants but of the children of immigrants. So it’s not the immigrants, nor their children, who make this nation America. It’s America that makes immigrants, and their children, Americans.