Josh Hawley: U.S. Is a ‘Nation of Americans,’ Not of Immigrants

The first priority of federal immigration policy should be to help the extended family of American citizens, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said.

“Missourians know that while this country has a noble heritage of welcoming strangers from many lands, we are a nation of Americans,” Hawley wrote in an op-ed for Fox News.

Hawley used the “nation of Americans” term in place of the establishment’s “Nation of Immigrants” narrative that was created in the Cold War. The vocabulary change is needed because he is calling for a reformed immigration policy that is intended to help existing Americans:

When you come to this country, you join a family – the American family. And in America, we stick up for one another, believe in one another, fight for one another. Unfortunately, our ruling elite has given up on all that. They’ve become globalists first and Americans second.

Hawley’s focus on the government’s obligations to citizens is sharply different from the Democrat coalition of investor groups and progressive allies.

In general, the Democrat coalition views ordinary Americans as replaceable consumers, renters, and workers in a relentless global economy, or as decorative greeters outside a “Nation of Immigrants.”

The view of Americans as disposable economic factors and political tools dominates President Joe Biden’s administration. An example is Biden’s officials boast of “equity” as they deliver more poor migrants into the U.S., taking homes and jobs that would otherwise go to Americans.

The administration’s language also reflects that view.

The job-seeking migrants are frequently described as “asylum seekers” and as refugees fleeing hate in the hope of a better life. In February 2021, for example, Biden signed an Executive Order ordering the government to welcome both illegal and legal migrants as “New Americans,” thereby removing the government’s distinction between American citizens and illegal migrants:

 New Americans and their children fuel our economy, working in every industry, including healthcare, construction, caregiving, manufacturing, service, and agriculture. … They contribute to our arts, culture, and government, providing new traditions, customs, and viewpoints.

“The Federal Government should … embrace the full participation of the newest Americans [including illegal migrants] in our democracy,” the document states.

This “New American” and other humanitarian language allows Democrats — and their donors — to feel good when they focus their attention and empathy on the low-wage and grateful migrants instead of helping young Americans build families:

Hawley, however, asserted that immigration policy must help existing Americans, not migrants:

We need an immigration policy that works for the citizens of this country, not the global elite. That begins with securing the southern border. Enough apologies and temporizing. Build the wall. Fund the border patrol. Back ICE. You can count on me to fight for all of the above.

Next, we need to reform our legal immigration system to make it work for Missouri workers.  For decades now, we’ve admitted millions of immigrants with few or no skills – the percetage of foreign-born is at its highest levels in nearly a century. These low-skill immigrants are competing for jobs with folks in our own country struggling to find work, while driving down wages for those who are working hardest.

It’s time to do right by American workers. Limit the number of low-skilled immigrants who come to this country. End the visa lottery system. End chain migration. Replace that with a skills-based immigration system that prioritizes the training and know-how we need to create new jobs in this country for our own people.”

Other pro-American activists have tried to promote language that helps Americans refocus their immigration system on Americans’ needs–without any need to demean poor migrants.

“This country has prioritized the importation of cheap labor,” including cheap legal immigrants, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl) said in his 2023 book, titled Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity.

Former Sen. Jeff Sessions — who was President Donald Trump’s first champion in the 2016 campaign — is calling for a “positive immigration policy“:

A positive immigration policy would use firm enforcement to admit highly skilled people who can deliver significant economic gains, while restricting the admission of less-skilled people who are more likely to earn low wages in our market and need to rely on taxpayers for support—not because of any moral shortcoming on their part, but because that’s the economic reality that we face.

Hawley is expected to face former Sen. Claire McCaskill — a pro-migration Democrat — in the 2024 elections.

Biden’s policy of Extraction Migration has added at least four million foreign workers as it tries to reinflate the cheap-labor bubble.

That flood of migrants was urged and welcomed by business groups because it cuts Americans’ blue-collar wages and white-collar salaries. It also reduces marketplace pressure to invest in productivity-boosting technology, Heartland states, and overseas markets. and it reduces economic pressure on the federal government to deal with the drug and “Deaths of Despair” crises.

Biden’s easy-migration policies are deliberately adding the foreigners’ problems to the lengthening list of Americans’ problems — homelessness, low wages, a shrinking middle class, slowing innovation, declining blue-collar life expectancy, spreading poverty, the rising death toll from drugs, and the growing alienation of young people.

A June 3-6 YouGov poll of 1,500 citizens asked, “In general, do you think immigration makes the U.S. better off or worse off?”

A 36 percent plurality of all respondents said immigration — legal and illegal — makes the country “worse off,” while just 31 percent said immigration makes the nation “better off.” Registered voters were split: 37 percent answered “worse off,” and 35 percent said “better off.”