Immigrants Remain a Driving Force of U.S. Power
Newcomers have long made the country stronger. Is there any good reason to think they aren’t doing so now?
This is America.
Photographer: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The first two people from the U.S. to settle in California were sailors who arrived in 1816. One was a white man named Thomas Doak, the other a black man known only as Bob. Initially arrested for smuggling near Santa Barbara along with their ship’s captain, the men decided to stay and were rechristened Felipe Santiago and Juan Cristobal, respectively. “They took out Spanish citizenship and married California women, living out their days as prosperous householders,” Kevin Starr wrote in his classic history, “Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915.”
The society they entered was, to quote Starr again, “one without schools, without manufactures, without defenses, administered by a quasi-feudal mission system and inhabited by a population that barely exceeded 1,500.”3 When Mexico declared independence from Spain in 1821, it also was left with no colonial overlord, and only the weakest of supervision from Mexico City.