On July 5, 1976, President Gerald Ford commemorated the bicentenary of the American Revolution by attending a naturalization ceremony at Monticello, Virginia. In doing so, he not only celebrated the 300 new citizens sat before him, but the continued influence of something that, to him, was central to the American founding: immigration. After all, it was “such transfusions of traditions and cultures” that made “America unique among nations and Americans a new kind of people.” Ford did not stop there. He equally hoped to commemorate the “founding fathers” who built “in this beautiful land a home for equal freedom and opportunity, a haven of safety and happiness, not for themselves alone, but for all who would come to us through centuries.”[1] As many historians now agree, this triumphalist rhetoric belies the many legal and cultural barriers migrants faced in the United States throughout the founding era. Even so, Ford’s celebratory myth remains extraordinarily resilient in the public imagination.

Gerald Ford celebrates the Bicentennial of the American Revolution by leading a naturalization ceremony at Monticello, Virginia, July 5, 1976. From the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum, https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/galleries/celebration-bicentennial-american-revolution#2308.

For much of the twentieth century, historians parroted this mythology too. Early scholars like Carl Wittke praised the United States, saying it was intended “to give freedom to the downtrodden of the earth,” and later emerged as a “melting pot” of cultures and ethnicities.[2] Even foundational scholars like John Higham and Maldwyn Jones agreed that while the U.S. government implemented restrictions in the late nineteenth century, the founding ushered in an “open-door” era of migration.[3] While this idea has not been dispensed with entirely in modern works, the historiographical conversation has transformed amid the growing securitization of the U.S. border since the turn of the millennium. Crucially, the vast majority of historians now recognize that migrants faced significant barriers to their mobility, rights, and access to citizenship from the moment of independence. Despite the proliferation of republican ideals, such as Thomas Paine’s infamous invocation of the “American asylum,” early migration debates were tempered by the exclusionary impulses of policymakers on the grounds of race, gender, and perceptions of productivity. What emerged was not an “open-door” era of migration, but a series of increasingly restrictive state and national policies throughout the late eighteenth century.

Perhaps the most well-known example of restrictive policymaking in the early republic is the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. Legislated amidst growing partisanship and Francophobia, the acts significantly narrowed access to citizenship and granted President John Adams the extraordinary power to deport any migrants considered a threat to national security. Yet, as many recent works now acknowledge, the xenophobic sentiment underlying this moment was certainly not new. Since the Revolution itself, migrants faced barriers to their settlement, rights, and citizenship across several states in the Union. In Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York, naturalized citizens were barred from political office; a policy that their national representatives later tried to enshrine in the U.S. Constitution in 1788 and again by amendment in 1798. Perhaps most tellingly, to the Connecticut legislature, it was this restrictionism that remained “an object so important to our national independence.”[4]Despite this transformation in the historiography, popular narratives of immigration at the founding remain largely unchanged. As several contributors to the JER’s roundtable on the Revolution at 250 show, this phenomenon is hardly unique to this particular field. Despite the influx of new pathbreaking work on the founding era, T. H. Breen notes, little “seems to have affected in more than a superficial way the books on the American Revolution that dominate the popular market.”[5] As a consequence, Leslie Harris adds, “the most acclaimed works for the general public on the Revolutionary era and the ‘Founding Fathers’ laud the positive aspects of the era” and, perhaps most significantly in this case, “the visionary reach of the Founders in terms of expanding the basis of citizenship.”[6] For immigration histories, this issue also extends well beyond the dissemination of popular books. Indeed, mythmaking continues to be reproduced, and often repurposed, in contemporary American political culture more generally.[7]

Reanimating Ford’s bicentennial spirit, U.S. naturalization ceremonies continue to celebrate citizenship within the context of the founding. In recent years, new citizens have been ordained in range of locations across the United States and its territories, from Ellis Island to Florida’s Walt Disney World, and even in Saddam Hussein’s fallen Al-Faw Palace in Baghdad, Iraq. Much like the bicentennial, each of these ceremonies, and indeed many more, were hosted on dates commemorating various aspects of the American founding, including the signings of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. In doing so, they explicitly connected the accession of citizenship with the very ideals of American Revolution. At a July 2020 ceremony, Vice President Mike Pence argued that the sixteen migrants sat before him were not only joining the United States as citizens, but as “part of the great and storied history” of the founding itself.[8] In some cases, this revolutionary connection is made even more explicit. At a 2015 ceremony at the US National Archives in DC, President Barack Obama delivered remarks directly in front of the original copies of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. In doing so, he gestured to the audience that they too continued “this history, this heritage” as, after all, the United States was “born of immigrants. This is who we are. Immigration is our origin story.”[9]

Barack Obama leads the Pledge of Allegiance at a Naturalization Ceremony in the National Archives, Washington, DC, Dec. 15, 2015. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza, from the President Barack Obama Collections at Whitehouse.gov, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/12/16/president-obama-welcomes-new-americans.

It is perhaps unsurprising that naturalization ceremonies would evoke such commemorative narratives, but this rhetoric exists equally elsewhere. In 2021, President Joe Biden proclaimed National Immigrant Heritage month with a speech celebrating the revolutionary role of the United States as an asylum for migrants seeking refuge. “America is, always has been, and always will be a nation of immigrants,” he insisted; “it was the premise of our founding.”[10] This mythology has even crossed the political aisle, with the 2016 Republican Party Platform proving equally effusive in the notion that “America is exceptional because of our historic role. . . . From its beginning, our country has been a haven of refuge and asylum.”[11] Of course, this narrative has become deeply intertwined with popular American culture more broadly too. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton the Musical has proved a particularly potent example. When the show debuted on Broadway in 2015, record-breaking audiences were enraptured with the story of an unlikely American hero, the “immigrant” founding father Alexander Hamilton. Perhaps most importantly, it was received not just as a history lesson on the founder but as emblematic of the seemingly American impulse to embrace immigration writ large. To the show’s creators, the premise was simple; to “reintroduce people to the poor kid from the Caribbean . . . an immigrant who came here to build a life for himself and ended up helping to build the nation.”[12] As David Waldstreicher and Jeffrey Pasley demonstrate, this is just one of many ways in which Hamilton “makes its hero into a great white hope for the founding,” creating a “past that is myth, not history.”[13]

Protestors use the celebrated Hamilton lyric, “Immigrants: We Get the Job Done” to protest the first inauguration of President Donald Trump, Jan. 29, 2017. Photo by Tim Pierce. From Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Immigrants-_we_get_the_job_done_(31765829664).jpg.

As we approach the 250^th anniversary of the Revolution, the chasm between public and historiographical interpretations of immigration at the founding continues to persist. Crucially, with immigration quickly becoming one of the most contentious political issues in the modern U.S., this issue has come to define not only how Americans understand their past, but their future too. Indeed, in the short time since President Trump has retaken office in 2025, the veneer of optimistic immigration narratives has given way to the crushing realities of restrictionist policymaking. In a series of executive orders issued hours after his inauguration, Trump increased policing at the U.S. border, expanded deportation efforts, and, perhaps most remarkably, promised to “protect” the “priceless and profound gift” of American identity by attempting to end birthright citizenship.[14] At the same time, protestors against the Trump administration continue to reiterate founding myths as a means of resistance. Indeed, in the decade since it was first uttered on a Broadway stage, Hamilton’s famous line “immigrants: we get the job done” has become a political call to arms against restrictionism. Though well meaning, this protest belies the nature of the current political climate; the United States doesn’t seem to be departing from its founding vision of immigration, it’s returning to it.

A much-needed corrective of this formative topic in the public imagination has never been more necessary. Here, the JER roundtable seems especially instructive. While modern political conflict serves as a form of commemoration in and of itself, as Michael Hattem rightly argues, it is worth reckoning with the question of whether, in the case of immigration specifically, it’s direct association with, and celebration within, founding narratives has proved more harmful than good.[15] Instead, as Harris contends, an “honest engagement with the complex legacies of the founding era” calls “not for a static commemoration, but a critical engagement” with popular mythmaking and founding narratives more generally.[16] Only through this can we fully understand the shortcomings of the American past on immigration and, as a consequence, how to harness the potential of the Founding in the future.

Endnotes

[1] Gerald R. Ford, “Remarks at Naturalization Ceremonies at Monticello, Virginia,” July 5, 1976, The American Presidency Project.

[2] Carl Wittke, We Who Built America: The Saga of the Immigrant (New York, 1939), xi.

[3] John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York, 1963); Maldwyn Jones, American Immigration (Chicago, 1960).

[4] Charles J. Hoadly et al., ed., The Public Records of the State of Connecticut (Hartford, CT, 1894-2013), 9: 268.

[5] T. H. Breen, “The Revolution at 250: A Conversation,’” Journal of the Early Republic 44 (Winter 2024), 516.

[6] Leslie M. Harris, ibid., 532.

[7] Connie Thomas, “Regional Interests and the Development of Migration Policy in the American Republic, 1776-1798,” PhD Dissertation (Queen Mary University of London: 2024).

[8] Mike Pence, “Remarks by the Vice President at a Naturalization Ceremony,” July 2020, The American Presidency Project.

[9] Barack Obama, “Remarks at a Naturalization Ceremony at the National Archives and Records Administration,” 2015, The American Presidency Project.

[10] Joseph R. Biden, “A Proclamation on National Immigration Heritage Month,” June 1, 2021, Presidential Actions, Biden White House Archive.

[11] “2016 Republican Party Platform,” July 18, 2016, The American Presidency Project.

[12] Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution (New York, 2016), 15.

[13] David Waldstreicher and Jeffrey L. Pasley, “Hamilton as Founders Chic: A Neo-Federalist, Antislavery Usable Past?,” in Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past, ed. Renee C. Romano & Claire Bond Potter (New Brunswick, NJ, 2018), 140.

[14] “‘Executive Order: Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” Jan. 20, 2025, Presidential Actions, The White House Archive.

[15] Michael D. Hattem, “The Revolution at 250: A Conversation,” 573–76.

[16] Ibid., 572.