# Quote — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not "A Nation of Immigrants"

> The United States has never been "a nation of immigrants." It has always been a settler state with a core of descendants from the original colonial settlers, that is, primarily Anglo-Saxons, Scots Irish, and German. The vortex of settler colonialism sucked immigrants through a kind of seasoning process of Americanization, not as rigid and organized as the "seasoning" of Africans, which rendered them into human commodities, but effective nevertheless.

- Author: [Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roxanne-dunbar-ortiz.md)
- Book: [Not "A Nation of Immigrants"](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roxanne-dunbar-ortiz/not-a-nation-of-immigrants.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Roxanne_Dunbar-Ortiz#Not_%22A_Nation_of_Immigrants%22:_Settler_Colonialism,_White_Supremacy,_and_a_History_of_Erasure_and_Exclusion_(2021)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/roxanne-dunbar-ortiz/not-a-nation-of-immigrants/the-united-states

## More from this book

> This idea of the gift-giving Indian helping to establish and enrich the development of the United States is a screen that obscures the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources, reducing the Indigenous population, and forcibly relocating and incarcerating them in reservations. The fundamental unresolved issues of Indigenous lands, treaties, and sovereignty could not but scuttle the premises of multiculturalism for Native Americans.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roxanne-dunbar-ortiz/not-a-nation-of-immigrants/this-idea-of-the.md)

> "A nation of immigrants" was a mid-twentieth-century revisionist origin story.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roxanne-dunbar-ortiz/not-a-nation-of-immigrants/a-nation-of-immigrants.md)

> The United States will not decolonize until it is forced to do so. And unless colonization and imperialism are understood to be inherent in the very founding and all US institutions, we cannot begin to dismantle the fiscal-military state.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/roxanne-dunbar-ortiz/not-a-nation-of-immigrants/the-united-states-will.md)