Politics & Power Quote by Charles Rangel

Rangel’s line works because it’s less a history lesson than a political wedge disguised as common sense. “Historically” is doing the heavy lifting: it preempts the selective nostalgia that treats immigration as a new problem rather than a founding condition. He’s not arguing that immigration is always smooth or always virtuous; he’s arguing that it’s constitutive. To deny immigrants, in this frame, is to deny the country’s own origin story.

The phrase “a nation of immigrants” is intentionally broad, almost bland, and that’s the point. It’s a big-tent claim meant to pull together people who disagree on policy but still want to see themselves as patriotic and fair-minded. It also functions as a moral alibi: if America is built by newcomers, then demonizing newcomers starts to look not merely harsh but un-American. That’s a powerful reversal in debates where “American” is often defined by exclusion.

The subtext is sharper when you place it in Rangel’s biography and constituency. As a Harlem congressman and longtime Democratic power broker, he’s speaking from a district shaped by Black migration, Caribbean immigration, and constant reinvention. He’s also speaking as someone for whom “immigrant” rhetoric can be both solidaristic and strategic: it invokes inclusion without naming the hardest fractures, especially the fact that much of the nation was built not just by immigrants but by enslaved people and dispossessed Native nations.

That omission isn’t accidental; it’s pragmatic politics. The line aims to win the argument in the room, not resolve the argument in the archive.