Trump’s new 250 years of American expansion

The next wave of more than 18 million immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe and lasted from 1890 to the 1920s. With each wave came the inevitable backlash, as Americans worried that the new arrivals would take their jobs and threaten their way of life. Quotas and restrictive laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act soon followed.

The Immigration Act of 1924 severely restricted immigration, which can be identified by a distinct curve on the US annual population growth chart.

The most recent wave of immigration began in the 1960s, when these restrictions were lifted. Since then, more than 70 million immigrants have entered the United States, many from Asia and Latin America, including nearly 18 million from Mexico alone.

In the year By 2024, 14.8% of the U.S. population would be foreign-born — a rate equal to the historic high in 1890, according to the Institute for Immigration Policy. Immigration accounts for 84 percent of all U.S. population growth.

According to Woodard, earlier waves of immigration — largely driven by industrialization — helped increase the political power of the American North.

And that geographic disparity has helped fuel further ideological divisions.

Southern leaders pushed for territorial expansion and expansion of slave states to maintain political power at the national level before starting the Civil War.

But modern trends have changed this geographical division. Many immigrants — and Northern transplants — are now drawn to the South, especially cities in Texas and Florida with struggling economies. The recent influx of illegal immigrants along the southern border of the United States has heightened tensions.

Trump’s populist conservatism, then, can be seen as a reaction to America’s changing centers.

When Trump returned to the White House, he campaigned on his promise to pursue mass deportations.

Meanwhile, he expressed nostalgia for 19th-century territorial expansion, including buying Greenland, reclaiming the Panama Canal, and adding Canada and Venezuela as the “51st States.”

His version of American expansion is thus a mirror image of the past 250 years of history. The country spent the first century physically expanding, then stopped trying to acquire new territory and focused — sometimes paused — on opening the country to immigrants.

Now, Trump has reversed course to once again expand America’s physical borders and limit the number of people the country can admit.

Trump and his supporters say it is in danger of fundamentally and permanently changing the character of the American nation. “We will have no more country” is a typical Trump refrain of mass immigration.

“This doesn’t come out of nowhere,” Woodard said. “We have a meta-struggle in American history: Are we a civic nation in a society where every person is equally, universally, and permanently free over time? Or is it a certain group of people who are true Americans by blood and birth?”

250 years is a blip, a blip, a blink of an eye in the vast history of the world. But for America, 250 years have been transformative — even if the divisions at the nation’s heart and concerns about the future are enduring features.