Colin Woodard writes:

It is said that America is a nation of immigrants, and for a truism, that’s pretty accurate. But it’s also true that the United States hasn’t always been a nation of immigrants — or at least not all at the same time and not in all the same places.

These days, the debate over immigration still revolves around age-old issues — whether immigrants can assimilate, whether they must assimilate, whether the nation is augmented by newcomers or harmed by them. We see this debate playing out in public when President Donald Trump claims immigrants “destroyed our country,” when Vice President JD Vance talks of “heritage” Americans and when pop stars and other public figures push back.

The reality is that from its founding the United States has been divided over how we define our nation and who can belong to it. And that divide has been geographic, built on massive differences in ideas about freedom, identity and belonging that go back to rivalries between this continent’s competing colonial projects that date back three and four centuries.

Those colonial projects had different experiences with immigrants and immigration. That was particularly the case during the massive influx of foreign-born residents between 1880 and 1924 that is known as the Great Wave.

I’ve been studying these geographical differences for many years, and my research has found that our current debate over immigration still reflects ideas and migration patterns that are more than a century old. On one side are ethnonationalists who assert that only the people with the right lineage and faith can belong to America. On the other is the civic nationalist tradition where anyone who shares the universal ideas about human freedom in the Declaration of Independence is a potential American. Both of these ideologies arise from patterns of colonial settlement clashing with various influxes of immigrants over the centuries that followed the American founding.

To resolve our current conflicts over immigration and national identity, it will help to understand the nature of the problem, its historical and present-day geography and the battle we’re now in for the soul of the country.

As I have previously written in articles on gun violence and life expectancy disparities, when it comes to defining U.S. geography it’s best to forget Census Bureau divisions, which arbitrarily divide the country into a Northeast, Midwest, South and West, using often meaningless state boundaries and a depressing ignorance of history. The reason the U.S. has strong regional differences is because our swath of the North American continent was settled by rival colonial projects that had very little in common, often despised one another and spread without regard for today’s state (or international) boundaries.

Those colonial projects — Puritan-controlled New England; the Dutch-settled area around what is now New York City; the Quaker-founded Delaware Valley; the Scots-Irish-dominated upland backcountry of the Appalachians; the West Indies-style slave society in the Deep South; the Spanish project in the southwest and so on — had different religious, economic and ideological characteristics. They settled much of the eastern half and southwestern third of what is now the United States in mutually exclusive settlement bands before significant in-migration from ethnic and religious groups not already represented in the colonies picked up steam in the 1840s.

As I described in my 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America and expanded on in a new book, Nations Apart: How Clashing Regional Cultures Shattered America — these rival colonization projects laid down the institutions, cultural norms and ideas about freedom, social responsibility and the provision of public goods that later arrivals would encounter and, by and large, assimilate into. Some states lie entirely or almost entirely within one of these regional cultures (Mississippi, Vermont, Minnesota and Montana, for instance). Other states are split between the regions, propelling constant and profound internal disagreements on politics and policy alike in places like Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio or California.

At Nationhood Lab, a project I founded at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, we use this regional framework to analyze all manner of phenomena in American society. We’ve looked at everything from gun violence and social mobility to Covid-19 vaccination and mortality rates, life expectancy, the prevalence of diabetes, obesity, and authoritarian mindsets to the geography of the 2024 presidential vote, the 2022 midterms, and this year’s key elections in Virginia and New Jersey.

You might wonder how the divides between rival colonization streams could possibly have survived a century and a half of mass immigration from completely different parts of the world. The amazing thing is that instead of homogenizing the American experience, mass immigration actually increased the distinctions between the regions. Distinct regional ideas about identity and belonging, economics and land ownership, tolerance and assimilation led immigrants to move to some regions and avoid others altogether. And the result is that ideas about the benefits and costs of immigration diverged — and hardened. [Continue reading…]