Book: A Nation of Immigrants

Overview
John F. Kennedy’s A Nation of Immigrants, written in 1958 while he was a U.S. senator, argues that America’s character, prosperity, and democratic vitality are inseparable from its immigrant origins. Commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League amid renewed debates over restriction, the book blends history, policy critique, and civic exhortation. Kennedy contends that each generation’s newcomers have faced suspicion yet ultimately broadened the nation’s capacity for freedom and opportunity, and he urges immigration laws that reflect the country’s ideals rather than inherited prejudices.

Historical Arc
Kennedy sketches a brisk history of settlement and migration: colonial America’s mix of English, Dutch, German, and other European settlers; the 19th century influx of Irish fleeing famine and Germans seeking liberty and land; Chinese laborers who helped build the railroads before facing exclusion; and the great turn-of-the-century wave from southern and eastern Europe, Italians, Jews, Poles, and others, who remade cities and industries. He pairs these chapters with the recurring pattern of backlash: the Know-Nothing movement, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and ultimately the quota laws of the 1920s that curtailed entries and froze the ethnic composition of the country.

Nativism and Assimilation
A central theme is the cyclical nature of nativism. Yesterday’s outsiders often become today’s insiders, and the very groups once caricatured as unassimilable come to embody mainstream American life. Kennedy catalogs the charges leveled at successive waves, crime, radicalism, cultural incompatibility, and shows that education, work, intermarriage, and civic participation steadily dissolved those fears. He stresses that assimilation in the United States is not a demand for uniformity but an evolving balance between heritage and allegiance to a common creed of liberty and equality.

Economic and Civic Contributions
Kennedy counters economic anxieties with evidence that immigrants have historically supplied labor, ideas, and entrepreneurial energy, accelerating growth and innovation while replenishing a democratic society with strivers. From farming frontier lands to staffing factories, from small business storefronts to laboratories and studios, immigrants diversified skills and broadened consumer markets. He links these contributions to civic renewal, arguing that people who choose America reinvigorate its founding promises through service, political participation, and a lived stake in the system.

Policy Critique and Proposals
At the heart of the book is a critique of the national origins quota system established in the 1920s. Kennedy calls it discriminatory in design and contrary to American principles because it privileges certain European ancestries, effectively bars Asians, and marginalizes newer sources of immigration. He argues that such laws undermine U.S. moral authority during the Cold War, when the nation claims leadership of the free world while practicing legal bias at home. He urges replacing quotas with fairer criteria that emphasize family reunification, needed skills, and humanitarian responsibilities to refugees. Screening for security and health should be firm but not a pretext for prejudice.

American Identity and Purpose
Kennedy frames the United States as a civic nation, stitched together not by bloodlines but by shared ideals and institutions. He invokes the motto e pluribus unum and the promise inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty to argue that openness is not sentimentality but strategic strength. The book’s tone is optimistic without naiveté: challenges are real, but the historical record suggests that inclusion, when coupled with confidence in democratic assimilation, yields a more creative, just, and united country.

Legacy
A Nation of Immigrants helped shape the conversation that led to dismantling the quota system in the 1960s. Its enduring claim is simple and demanding: immigration policy should align with the nation’s creed, honoring both the contributions of those who came before and the potential of those who seek to join.