The US as a true nation of immigrants from conception

The US has almost always been known as a "nation of immigrants" however prior to the 1960's those immigrants were primarily from Europe.

What if from the time of the founding fathers or a little afterwards the US truly did open itself up and encourage the immigration of people's from all corners of the world. What kind of US could we have seen?

Certainly a bigger population entering the 20th century.
 
Well until the exclusion act US immigration was essentially unrestricted. Naturalization was restricted to whites. I'd say that the reason that the US had such high levels of immigration from western Europe and not the rest of the world is that those from western Europe were really the only ones able to immigrate. Countries that didn't have contact with America obviously couldn't immigrate.
 
Well until the exclusion act US immigration was essentially unrestricted. Naturalization was restricted to whites. I'd say that the reason that the US had such high levels of immigration from western Europe and not the rest of the world is that those from western Europe were really the only ones able to immigrate. Countries that didn't have contact with America obviously couldn't immigrate.

The US was not really de facto unrestricted immigration prior to the exclusion acts of the early 20th century. There were many explicit and implicit laws and acts which discouraged at the very least non-white immigration and permanent residency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_immigration_laws

I'm thinking of a situation where it's not just that those acts aren't there but there is actual yearning to get as many people to come over and populate the new nation.
 
What POD could result in the US not having any restrictions on immigration?

The US not being racist and the US not being a slave society until the 1860s.

I'd look along the lines of Ameriwanks, because the US not being racist means its much more likely to keep the Phillipines, annex parts of Mexico, etc.

I think it ultimately requires colonization by someone other than the English, or maybe people alongside.
 
The US not being racist and the US not being a slave society until the 1860s.

I'd look along the lines of Ameriwanks, because the US not being racist means its much more likely to keep the Phillipines, annex parts of Mexico, etc.

I think it ultimately requires colonization by someone other than the English, or maybe people alongside.
The U.S. not being racist? In the 19th century?

ASB, unless some sort pan-humanist movement comes about in TTL's enlightenment and gains some major currency. The sad fact of the matter is that racism is written into the human gene code, and it would require (and will require) major social upheavals to cure.
 
Impossible. America, like all settler colonies, is predicated primarily on the promise of wealth and political supremacy for the settler class, which has expanded over time to be simply defined by whiteness rather than just WASPness. The entire social contract that underpinned slavery, Indian eradication and the rest was white supremacy; immigration was open so long as the basic tenets of that contract weren't seen as threatened. We can see this with what restrictions were placed and when; Asians were banned early, when they "threatened" to undermine white supremacy in California both in labor and in culture. Southern Europeans and Jews were restricted later, so as to prevent what the powers-that-were saw as a tide of subaltern people ready to undermine the white-supremacist social contract. Black people have been held under the jackboot of law and society for the entirety of our history, treated worse than most immigrants, a conquered people inside their own country. And their labor migration was itself restricted -- both in what neighborhoods they could settle and whether or not they could leave (Jim Crow was firstly a way for Southron elites to prevent the drain of the black labor that sustained their postwar -- and prewar -- society.)

Above all else, that singular idea -- the social, political and economic supremacy of white-coded settlers -- rules not just America but the entire New World, Australia, New Zealand and Israel, just as it ruled Algeria, Rhodesia and South Africa pre-Mandela. It is the sociological basis for our society, the very reason this country exists. To open immigration to all peoples from the start would be a negation of the basic premise of America's existence, and would spark an immediate, furious backlash. Imagine Know-Nothings on crack -- this was a country that was only a few decades removed from seeing fucking SWEDES as swarthy (in the words of Ben Franklin).

A non-racist Amerikkka is a contradiction in terms.
 
The major reason the USA drew most of its immigrants from Europe was that Europe alone, along with its more heavily settler colonies, was undergoing the transformation to modern industrial capitalism that among other things fostered a quantum leap in mobility and willingness to relocate.

As things were therefore, it was not generally necessary for 19th century American policy makers to limit immigration by place of origin.

But if that surge in mobility had been as readily available to people of other origins across the world, I don't doubt they would have acted to do so. Because in fact when particular sources, such as China, from outside Europe did produce large numbers of immigrants, policy did in fact react against them particularly.
 
The US didn't really have any restrictions on immigration for most of the 1800's because it didn't really need them. Europeans were the only ones who were really showing up. The first major non-European immigrant group to start arriving was the Chinese, and the response was the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned further immigration and prevented the Chinese from becoming citizens all the way until the 1940's.

So since the Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882, I'm thinking the main period we want to look at is the couple decades before that. Interestingly President Rutherford B. Hayes vetoed the Act the first time it was passed in 1878, so clearly there was some constituency for opposing it. How about a more successful reconstruction (maybe Lincoln isn't shot?) leads to a stronger radical Republican coalition and more opposition to banning Chinese immigration, plus improves race relations overall. Then the norm of "we don't exclude immigrants" could get better established and maybe the Chinese could become citizens and thus more politically powerful. Then as time goes on and other non-European groups start immigrating the precedent is set and they aren't blocked as IOTL either.

Who knows where the butterflies from all this take world history, but it's plausible that they could shake out to prevent the general shutting down of immigration that happened in the 1920's OTL, which would allow even more non-Europeans (as well as more Europeans) into the country as transportation costs declined.
 
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