The American Strength We Keep Forgetting
What This Value Means
Diversity is the presence of many cultures, languages, religions, and backgrounds within one nation, and the recognition that these differences strengthen society rather than weaken it. Immigration is the continual process by which new people join the American community, bringing knowledge, labor, traditions, and perspectives that enrich the nation. Together, they describe an America that is not defined by a single ethnicity or heritage, but by a shared civic identity built from many origins.
Why It Matters
Diversity fuels creativity, economic growth, and cultural vitality. Immigrants contribute disproportionately to entrepreneurship, scientific advancement, and innovation. A pluralistic society is more adaptable, more resilient, and better able to solve complex problems. Democracies function more fairly and effectively when no single group possesses absolute power. Diversity also strengthens national security by ensuring a broad range of languages, skills, and global connections. Far from a vulnerability, America’s diversity is one of its most consistent advantages.
Where This Value Comes From
Diversity and immigration are present at the nation’s founding and continue throughout its development.
- The colonies were home to English, Dutch, German, French, Scots-Irish, Jewish, and African communities, as well as Indigenous nations with distinct cultures and governance.
- The founders understood pluralism as a stabilizing force. In Federalist 10, James Madison argued that a large, diverse republic helps prevent tyranny by limiting factional dominance.
- Early leaders such as Washington and Hamilton openly encouraged immigration, particularly from skilled workers and artisans, recognizing their economic and intellectual value.
- The Naturalization Act of 1790, though limited, established a legal pathway to citizenship, showing that newcomers were expected to join the national community.
- The Statue of Liberty and Emma Lazarus’s poem later became national symbols of the country’s longstanding commitment to welcoming those seeking freedom and opportunity.
How American History Has Treated This Value
Every major era of American growth corresponds with waves of immigration. Immigrants built railroads, staffed factories, revitalized cities, expanded the frontier, and contributed heavily to scientific and cultural advancement. American music, literature, cuisine, and technology are the products of blended traditions. While periods of discrimination and exclusion have occurred, these moments have consistently contradicted and ultimately given way to the broader national pattern of expansion, integration, and renewal. The United States has repeatedly grown stronger by incorporating new communities.
Why This Value Is Not Partisan
Diversity and immigration are older than any political party and embedded in the nation’s founding philosophy. The idea that America thrives by welcoming newcomers is not a modern invention but a principle supported by the founders and reinforced by centuries of experience. Both liberal and conservative eras have benefited from immigrant contributions, and both have celebrated America as a place where opportunity is open to anyone willing to work for it. Rejecting diversity is not conservative; it is contrary to American history itself.
Closing Principle
America has always been a nation of many peoples becoming one. Diversity is not an optional feature or a recent development; it is one of the structural forces behind the country’s success. Immigration is how the American story renews itself. A nation that forgets this forgets the source of its strength.
If you strip away the slogans, the myths, and the partisan noise, America’s story resolves into something both simple and extraordinary: this is a country built by people who came from somewhere else. It is a nation that exists because generation after generation believed they could build a better life here than the one they left behind. There has never been an America without immigrants. There has never been a United States that was culturally uniform or ethnically singular. The moment the first colonies were founded, the experiment began: people of different languages, customs, religions, and histories trying to build a shared future.
That fact is not incidental to the American character. It is the American character.
Diversity is often framed in contemporary politics as a recent development, as though pluralism was invented in the 1960s or imported by modern activists. But diversity is older than the country itself. The thirteen colonies included English settlers, Dutch merchants, German farmers, French Huguenots, Scots-Irish laborers, Jewish communities in Newport and New Amsterdam, free and enslaved Africans with deep cultural traditions, and Indigenous nations whose stewardship of the land far predated European arrival. The founding generation lived in a world of difference and complexity, and although they struggled with their own prejudices and moral blind spots, they understood something essential: a large, varied, and constantly renewing population would be a source of resilience, not fragility.
James Madison devoted an entire argument in the Federalist Papers to this idea. In Federalist 10, he explained that a large republic, with many competing factions, interests, and identities, was actually more stable than a homogenous one. Tyranny, he argued, is more easily prevented when no single group holds all the power. Diversity, in Madison’s view, was a safeguard against oppression. The founders didn’t use our modern language, but the underlying principle is unmistakable: difference can protect freedom.
The early republic acted on this belief. Immigration laws were, for much of the nation’s history, generous by global standards. Skilled workers, artisans, and thinkers were openly encouraged to come, because leaders like Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson understood that new ideas and new talents were essential to the country’s growth. The United States Patent Office, early public schools, scientific societies, and rapidly expanding cities were all byproducts of a culture that welcomed innovation and the people who brought it.
When people imagine the America of the past as ethnically uniform, they’re remembering a country that never existed. What they are recalling is the myth — a sanitized, simplified image that ignores the truth in favor of nostalgia. The real America has always been crowded, textured, and cosmopolitan. Every major American city is a record of this process. Every wave of immigration left its fingerprints on our architecture, our music, our literature, our food, our religions, and our politics. Everything from the blues to the polka, from pizza to bagels, from jazz to rock and roll, from Broadway to Hollywood, grew out of cultural collisions that produced something new. Even our national holidays, from Thanksgiving to Independence Day, carry layers of influence and adaptation.
This isn’t accidental. Diversity has been an engine of creativity and economic growth from the beginning. Immigrants built railroads, staffed factories, revived decaying cities, started businesses, founded universities, and contributed out of all proportion to scientific and technological breakthroughs. At every stage of American history, from the Industrial Revolution to the space program to the modern tech sector, diverse communities have fueled our greatest achievements.
And yet, despite the overwhelming historical evidence, America routinely forgets this. Each generation inherits the gifts of pluralism and then, bewilderingly, entertains the idea that diversity is a threat. It’s a recurring pattern: established groups fear newcomers, claim the country will be changed beyond recognition, and insist that only they possess the “real” American identity. But the newcomers are absorbed, appreciated, and eventually declared to be the true Americans after all — right before the next wave arrives and the cycle begins again.
The irony is striking. Those who insist America must be culturally uniform are rejecting the very force that made the nation possible in the first place.
The most powerful symbol of this ideal stands in New York Harbor. The Statue of Liberty was not built as a monument to fear or resentment. It was built as a promise, a commitment to the idea that freedom is not a zero-sum resource, that opportunity is not diminished when shared, and that human dignity increases when people are allowed to build new lives unburdened by the oppression or poverty they fled. Emma Lazarus’s famous poem, so often quoted but rarely taken seriously, captures a profound truth: America’s greatness lies not in purity but in welcome, not in exclusion but in generosity.
Diversity is not an accidental feature of the American story. It is the through-line that connects every chapter. Immigration is not a burden; it is the closest thing this country has to a renewable source of strength. Our culture, our science, our economy, our military, and our democracy all depend on the contributions of people who chose to make this place their home. A nation that forgets this forgets itself.
To acknowledge the value of diversity is not to romanticize history or pretend the United States has always lived up to its ideals. Far from it. We have a long record of discrimination, nativism, and exclusion, from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the Know-Nothing movement to the quotas of the early twentieth century. These choices slowed our progress and contradicted our founding principles. Yet even through those dark moments, the drive to include, absorb, and expand has consistently reasserted itself. American identity grows deeper and more resilient each time it happens.
The truth is simple: diversity is not a weakness. It never has been. It is the central reason the American experiment works at all. The founders believed that a large, varied republic would be harder to corrupt, harder to control, and better equipped to safeguard liberty. History has proven them right. When we embrace the richness of our population, we renew the spirit that made this country possible. When we reject it, we drift toward the very forms of fear and smallness the founders hoped to transcend.
This is not a left-wing idea or a progressive idea. It is an American idea in the oldest sense of the word: rooted in the Enlightenment, inscribed in our political philosophy, confirmed by our history, and demonstrated by our successes. The United States thrives when it opens its doors. It falters when it closes them.
Diversity is the American inheritance. Immigration is the American story. And our future depends on remembering what our past has already made clear: we are strongest not when we are the same, but when we are many.