About Programs Fellowship News Calendar
Salzburg Global Fellow Jørn Brøndal traces historical shifts in the narrative of US borders from Manifest Destiny to the Trump era
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/1719775213
This op-ed was written by Jørn Brøndal, who attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program "Beyond the Nation-State? Borders, Boundaries, and the Future of Democratic Pluralism" from September 19 to 23, 2023.
Historically, borders played a distinct role in US mythmaking. As Richard Hofstadter noted in "The Progressive Historians", Frederick Jackson Turner saw the American frontier as different from any European: “in the European complex a frontier was a border, a boundary, a limitation, a place that is costly to defend […], whereas in America the frontier was the edge of the new and unused, a source of opportunity, a place where one might earn a reputation or a fortune.”
The continental United States reached its present shape through vast territorial expansion, from the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. Westward movement was celebrated as “Manifest Destiny”, which was a “white” vision that relegated Native Americans to oblivion and Mexicans to at most second-class citizenship; enslaved African Americans were viewed mostly as an impediment to national unity.
Legislation supported the notion of a “white” republic. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited access to citizenship to white immigrants. To be sure, another such act, passed in 1870, five years after the abolition of slavery, expanded access to citizenship to migrants of African descent. Such progress notwithstanding, the American Colonization Society, which existed from 1816 until 1964, remained committed to sending Black Americans “back” to Africa.
For white Americans and many white Europeans planning to migrate, the idea of the US as a virtually borderless society remained alive until 1917. Not so for other groups. From the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 until 1924, migrants of Asian descent, already barred from citizenship by naturalization legislation, were systematically excluded from entrance. In the 1920s, by which time most European arrivals were of Catholic, Jewish, or Christian Orthodox background, two restrictive quota laws in 1921 and 1924, along with the 1929 implementation of the principle of “national origins”, led to a dramatic reduction in European migration. By 1929, the idea was to return the nation to its white and mostly northern European “origins”. Cartoons of immigrants from this restrictionist era began depicting a United States surrounded by a wall.
In the 1960s, when the immigrant share of the US population approached a new historic low - by 1970, it amounted to just 4.7 percent, as compared with the high of 14.8 percent in 1890 - the United States underwent one of its most turbulent decades. Black protests, student unrest, and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations rocked the nation, while presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson offered expansive visions for the future; Kennedy talked about a New Frontier and sending a man to the moon, and Johnson signed a pivotal immigration act in 1965. With that act which prioritized family reunification and skills-based migration, in that order of priority, the United States opened its borders again, even as it set numerical limits to migration from the Western Hemisphere. A new law signed by George H.W. Bush in 1990 did not reverse that trend. With this legislation came the immigration multiplier, unanticipated by the authors of the 1965 act, as the number of US arrivals skyrocketed. During the first two decades of the 21st century, 20.9 million people arrived, especially from the Western Hemisphere and Asia.
Demographic projections now predict that by 2030, migration will surpass births as the main source of US population growth. By 2045, the “white” population will no longer constitute the majority. In 2060, the immigrant share of the population will reach a historic high of 17 percent.
Donald Trump’s angry rhetoric about building a wall should be viewed from this perspective. His immediate scapegoats are the unauthorized migrants, whose numbers actually declined from some 12.2 million in 2007 to 10.9 million in 2016 when he was elected president. But the looming threat, as MAGA Republicans see it, is that the white population is in relative decline and in danger of being “replaced” by other groups. Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi once claimed that when Trump said, “Make America Great Again,” he actually meant “Make America White Again”. She was right.
Previously, white Americans celebrated the westward-moving frontier and virtually no borders for European arrivals. The idea of a firm border arose with Asian migration and was strengthened when the majority of white arrivals were of southern and eastern European descent. With mass migration picking up again after 1965, Americans wary of dramatic demographic change began listening to politicians crying for more border security. They ended up supporting Donald Trump’s demand for a wall. Thus, the whole idea of US borders has undergone a process of Europeanization. Trump is the ultimate European demagogue.
Jørn Brøndal is professor and chair of the Center for American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. He specializes in US political, ethnic, and racial history.
Jørn attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program on “Beyond the Nation-State? Borders, Boundaries, and the Future of Democratic Pluralism” from September 19-23, 2023. The 2023 Salzburg Global American Studies Program focused on the contestations and renegotiations of boundaries beyond the nation-state, and how they are changing the representation of democratic pluralism.