Introduction

Over the centuries, prominent American thinkers have joined America's self-image as a nation of immigrants to its self-image as a universal nation founded upon abstract values. In Common Sense (1776), just as Americans were beginning their struggle to break with Great Britain, Thomas Paine triumphantly declared America “an asylum for mankind,” a refuge for the entire human species. In his novel Redburn (1849), published during the years of mass migration from Northwestern Europe, Herman Melville made the link in even more grandiose terms, declaring that, as a result of immigration, “American blood” was “the blood of the whole world,” even as Americans were “the heirs of all time.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the country experienced even greater migration from all over Europe, as well as from Asia and the Americas, thinkers again emphasized the link between immigration and universalism. Emma Lazarus's widely celebrated poem, “The New Colossus” (1883), written to celebrate the Statue of Liberty, announced a “world-wide welcome” for “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot (1908) hailed America's ability to absorb immigrants effortlessly from many different nations, even as the play's title secured a permanent place in the everyday American lexicon. In the post–World War II period, with a keen eye on Cold War politics, presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy wrote A Nation of Immigrants (1958), a book that struck the same note, joining immigration and universal values as the logic of American history.

This powerful strand of American thinking that has linked immigration, openness, and universalism as the very ontology of the country finds confirmation in brute numbers. From the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth, the United States received three-fifths of all the world's immigrants. The country remained the world's largest immigrant-receiving country throughout the twentieth century. In the early decades of the twenty-first, the United States continues to admit over a million immigrants annually to permanent residence, more than the number admitted by any other country. In fiscal year 2011, for example, the United States admitted 1,062,040 non-citizens to legal permanent resident (LPR) status and granted asylum to 24,988.