Immigrants, Subjects, and Citizens

By Harold B. Gill,Jr. - First published in the Spring 2014 issue of the Colonial Williamsburg Journal

The Title Page of the Colonial Williamsburg Journal article in the Spring 2014 issue

GEORGE WASHINGTON’S OBSERVATION WAS echoed one hundred years later in Emma Lazarus’s sonnet engraved on the Statue of Liberty. “No other nation,” British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said, “has so successfully combined people of different races and nations within a single culture.” Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. pointed out: “The luck so far of the American experiment has been due in large part to the vision of the melting pot.” “In this great American asylum,” wrote eighteenth-century French immigrant J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, “the poor of Europe have by some means met together (…) Urged by a variety of motives, here they came.” America is indeed a nation of immigrants.

The earliest permanent migrants from England, 105 of them on three ships, landed at Jamestown Island in May 1607 - Image Source: Internet Archive