What It Means To Be An American

On the question of immigration and identity

Over the last ten years, immigration has become one of the most important and controversial issues in American life. In this week’s episode of Rufo & Lomez, we’re going to tease out the big-picture questions about immigration: who’s here, who’s coming, who’s contributing, and what does it mean to be an American? The answers are not straightforward. We’ll give you a little bit of history, a little philosophy, a little policy, and at the end, with a little humor, we’ll ask who is more American: Rufo or Lomez?

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The following is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. Sign up now for premium access.

Rufo: Lomez, I saw on the internet this week somebody accusing you of being a foreign agent based in India. This caused me grave concern. What’s the story? Are you who you say you are? What’s going on?

Lomez: I’ve been accused of being a ragebait account located in India. Okay? You got me.

Rufo: Honestly, seems possible. It seems possible.

Lomez: Okay, look, I’m in Hyderabad right now. I’m at one of these industrial-scale H1B fraud farms. I’m rubber-stamping fake university credentials for my people here. I’m getting a small cut of this, feeding them into the H1B pipeline at Infosys. I’m doing the needful here. It’s all true. I’m in India. But these are the wages of globalism. I apologize for nothing.

Rufo: That seems fair. At least you’re owning up to it. You told me you were based in Montana; you had this compelling backstory, but we’re just going to roll with it.

Lomez: We’re all just global citizens now, Chris. These borders don’t matter. They’re meaningless abstractions. We are global citizens. It’s a singular humanity. One race: the race of humanity. We are all the same, pursuing the same goals and interests. So please, enough with the fascist rhetoric.

Rufo: That’s true.

Lomez: Insisting on national identities.

Rufo: That’s right. No, we don’t have a national identity. We’re skeptical of the idea, but we are going to talk about this question, which seems to be on everyone’s mind. It’s the question of immigration. And I know you have a different history. You’ve been thinking about the immigration question for a long time in a serious way. I’m a bit later to the game. In my teens and 20s, it was lower on my list of issues, but all thought has now converged. And it’s a messy debate. It’s not always clear who’s on which side. There are different Right-wing factions, different Left-wing factions. There’s some Right–Left overlap, like libertarians and neoliberals. They’ve tried to occupy the center. But before we get into the answers—which of course we have and we’re going to share—what are the stakes and what are the real questions writ large as we think about the issue of immigration?

Lomez: It’s such a huge topic. It’s hard to know where to begin. How do you wrap your arms around mass immigration, especially as it’s played out since the last major immigration law went into effect in the 1960s? Hart-Celler started this new process of taking in foreign nationals. In 1970, we had around 5% of our population foreign-born. Now it’s about 17%—roughly 53 million foreign-born people in the United States. That is the highest total ever by far, and the highest percentage. People talk about previous immigration waves—famously, 1880 through 1920, the “Ellis Island” wave. There was a slowdown during World War I, but otherwise it was a ramp of Western, Central, and some Eastern European immigration.

But even then, the percentage of total population was lower. It capped out around 15% in 1920, before the 1924 moratorium. We’ll come back to that: what the consequences were, how we survived it, how we maintained cultural continuity. But first we have to grapple with the enormous, unprecedented scale of what we’re dealing with now. And you brought up that I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Early 2000s, when I first became politically aware, I wasn’t happy about the Iraq war, didn’t identify with Bush-era conservatism, didn’t identify with liberal politics, saw what was happening in California, my home state, and recognized immigration as central to political life. Nobody talked about it outside two factions. You had the Bernie Sanders Left—early Sanders clips show he talked about immigration constantly: