By Lewis Liu
The United States of America was founded on a radical idea at the time as expressed in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” From this premise flows the essence of being American. It is allegiance to an ideal, not lineage, race, ethnicity, religion, or country of origin, that defines the nation.
Long before the United States existed, Indigenous peoples inhabited the North American continent for at least 15,000 to 20,000 years. Archaeological and genetic evidence shows that they migrated from Northeast Asia, crossing the Bering land bridge during the last Ice Age and gradually populating the continent. Over millennia, they developed hundreds of distinct nations, languages, and systems of governance, trade, and culture. Their presence predates any European claim by thousands of years, a fact that alone undermines simplistic notions of “original” American bloodlines.
European settlement began much later. The first permanent English colony was founded at Jamestown in 1607. In 1620, the Mayflower carried Pilgrims seeking religious freedom to New England. These settlers did not define belonging by ethnicity alone; they were united by the belief that liberty of conscience and self-government were worth risking everything for.
From that point forward, America grew through successive waves of immigration. Germans (1680s–1770s), Dutch (1620s–1660s), and Scots-Irish (1717–1775) arrived in the colonial period. Enslaved Africans (1619–1808) were forcibly brought to the continent, denied freedom but foundational to the nation’s economy and culture.
In the nineteenth century came Irish fleeing famine, Germans escaping political repression, and later Italians, Jews, Poles, and others seeking economic opportunity and political freedom. Since the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished national-origins e, the United States has opened its doors on more equal terms to immigrants from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, followed by newcomers from virtually every part of the world.
Many of these groups were subject to hostility, exclusion, and discrimination. Native Americans were dispossessed (roughly 1600s–late 1800s, culminating in the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the reservation system), Africans enslaved (1619–1865), Chinese immigrants barred by federal law (1882), Japanese Americans interned (1942–1945), and Catholics and Jews treated as perpetual outsiders (roughly 1840s–mid-20th century). Yet
these communities persevered. They worked, fought, voted, organized, built institutions, and steadily pushed the nation closer to its founding promises.
Against this history stands a competing vision of American identity—one based on lineage, blood, and soil, asserting that only those whose ancestry traces back to the founding era are “real” Americans. This view is not only historically false; it contradicts the very principle of the American founding. The United States was never an ethnic nation. It was a propositional nation, built on universal claims about human equality and unalienable rights.
More troublingly, this “blood and soil” conception closely resembles the racial nationalism that defined twentieth-century European fascism, including Hitler’s Nazism, which rejected human dignity and civic equality in favor of inherited identity. America’s founding ideal was the opposite: that citizenship rests on shared principles, not shared blood.
To be American, therefore, is not to inherit a particular ancestry but to affirm a shared commitment—to equality, liberty, and self-government under the rule of law. As Ronald Reagan once observed, a person may go to live in France, but can never truly become French; yet anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to the United States and become an American. That is because American identity is not rooted in blood or soil, but in allegiance to an idea. The American experiment endures not because of lineage or origin, but because people from every background have chosen these ideals as their own, and have insisted—again and again—that the nation live up to them.
In 2026, as we mark the 250th Anniversary of Independence, let us come together not merely to commemorate the past, but to renew our commitment to the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence, and to pass them on—intact and undiminished—to the generations that follow.