by Eric Ruark

This article was adapted from comments prepared by the author for the panel discussion “Immigration Through American Eyes” at the MCC-MRI Summit on the 10^th Anniversary of the European Migrant Crisis, which took place in Szeged, Hungary on September 24, 2025

“The real threat to American Democracy is that American voters keep on voting for less immigration and our politicians keep on rewarding us with more.”[1] – J.D. Vance

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution begins, “We the People of the United States.” This denotes an “Us” and supposes a “Them” – those who share different conceptions of themselves as politically organized groups. The American Revolution separated the thirteen colonies politically from Great Britain, but the establishment of the United States was not seen by the nation’s founders as a radical break from their British heritage but instead as a defense of traditional English rights and liberties that they believed had been violated by King George III and Parliament.[2]

Moreover, the Founders viewed America’s creation as firmly rooted in the Greco-Roman classical tradition and as an extension of political thought that emerged from the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Continental philosophers such as Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire profoundly shaped their understanding of liberty, civic virtue, and the proper structure of government—ideas that guided both their decision to break from Britain and their framing of the U.S. Constitution. Early Americans regarded themselves as a distinct and sovereign people, yet still heirs to a wider European intellectual and historical heritage that defined their vision for the new republic.[3]

Despite this shared lineage that long bound Europe and America, the relationship between Europe and America today is defined less by shared ideals than by shared dilemmas. What Europe and America share most in common at present is the challenge of mass migration. This challenge is an existential one; one that we in the West have imposed upon ourselves.[4]

“Können wir das schaffen?”

In 2015, the world watched as migrants from the Middle East and Africa poured into Europe by land and sea. The EU proved unwilling to take effective measures to stanch the flow, fueling a voter backlash — even in countries like Germany and Sweden where initially there was considerable public support for EU policies.[5] Popular opposition, however, had little effect on decisions made in Brussels, or by politicians in EU members states. Perhaps the moment that defined the gulf between voters and their elected leaders was German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s admonition, “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do this”).[6]

What exactly Merkel was aiming for in the long term was unclear, beyond the vague notion of Willkommenskultur.[7] The larger question remains: Wer ist dieses ‘Wir’? (Who is this “We”?)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban took a much different approach. Dubbing the crisis a “German problem,” Orban refused to acquiesce.[8] Hungary erected a fence on its border with Serbia and passed laws enabling the detention and removal of migrants who illegally entered its territory. The message Hungary sent to the EU, and to the rest of the world, was unambiguous – “We” will not allow unfettered migration.

To many Americans, the images coming from Europe in 2015 were shocking – and a foreboding of what was to occur in our own country a few years later under President Biden. It was at these junctures that mass migration to the West, long an intractable problem, assumed the character of an existential crisis—one that governments could no longer obscure or defer through routine policy measures, or the usual political diversions.

Vögelin: The Articulation of a Society

In The New Science of Politics (1952), German-America political philosopher Eric Vögelin wrote that the “process in which human beings form themselves into a society for action shall be called the articulation of a society.”[9] As Professors Robert A. Pascal and James Lee Babin described Vögelin’s thinking:

He had come to realize that ideas do not have a history, that only people do, and that their history consists of their successes and failures in the differentiation of their noetic [mental] and pneumatic [spiritual] experiences of life under God. For the same reason, he had come to realize that law cannot have a history apart from the history of the society whose order it articulates, and that its essence, or nature, is precisely the structure of the society whose law it is.[10]

This informed Vögelin’s thinking on the functioning of constitutional governments. He argued that a constitution will last only:

If the makers of the constitution have diagnosed the actual power articulation of the society correctly; if, further, they are good craftsmen and know how to give a legal articulation to the power reality of their society; and if, finally, the power structure that has entered the constitution is a stable one, then the constitution will last.[11]

Vögelin had a deep appreciation for America’s Founders, whom he praised for their “superb craftsmanship in devising legal forms for the stable structure” of the federal government.[12] He viewed America’s War of Independence much more favorably than he did the French Revolution. However, the American Constitution, and therefore its political order, was likewise rooted in the Enlightenment, which Vögelin believed contained dangerous “Gnostic” elements that invited social discord and political violence.[13]

A central theme in Vögelin’s corpus is his distinction between societies that remain open to transcendence and those that, in seeking to immanentize the divine, succumb to ideological deformation. When political order is constructed upon secular claims to truth accessible only to those in power, society severs itself from its spiritual foundation and risks what Vögelin termed pneumopathology—a disease of the spirit.

When applied to the contemporary debate over immigration, Vögelin’s analysis helps illuminate ideological formulations such as “America is a nation of immigrants,” “No human being is illegal,” and “Diversity is our strength.” Or, the oft-repeated economic rationale, “Immigration grows the economy.” These bromides have rhetorical appeal to an extent, while obscuring the deeper question of collective identity and the historical continuity of political communities in the West.

A Deepening Crisis of Confidence

H. Stuart Hughes, a prominent American historian of European intellectual history, argued that Europeans in the early years of the 20^th Century:

…had forgotten how unique and wonderful that civilization was and how slowly and painstakingly it had been built up…. The significance of these attitudes is apparent in the record of the two vast and infinitely destructive wars in which the Europeans all but committed cultural suicide.[14]

As the Great War forever destroyed the old order of Europe, and along with it, Europeans’ confidence in their cultural superiority, Americans became supremely confident in who “We” were, as the nation grew into the superpower it remains today. A robust sense of national identity and purpose was forged through a series of formative experiences which included two world wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, a man on the moon, and the ascendancy of the middle class, which notably included Black Americans. Radio, and later television, spread a shared mass culture that helped solidify this national identity. All this occurred during a period of low immigration.

Americans became so confident in ourselves that in 1965 we decided the country could manage significant numbers of immigrants from non-European countries. In the 1950s, 72 percent of immigrants to the United States came from Europe and Canada. From 2010 to 2019, this figure had declined to 11 percent. To add context, total immigration during this latter period was more than four times higher than it was in the mid-twentieth century. In total, since 1965, 48 million people have immigrated to the Unites States. Every child born to these immigrants has automatically gained U.S. citizenship.

One can argue that this profound shift was a good or bad thing. The point here is that it has irrevocably reshaped America in every conceivable way. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was not responsible for the political and cultural fault lines that have widened since the 1960s, but immigration, legal and illegal, did correspond to and exacerbate social divisions. By the 1990s, many Americans felt a sense of alienation as a result of several decades of mass immigration. President Clinton acknowledged this in a commencement speech at Portland State University in 1998:

Each year, nearly a million people come legally to America. No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time. What do the changes mean? They can either strengthen and unite us, or they can weaken and divide us. We must decide… I believe new immigrants are good for America... [but some Americans are] afraid the America they know and love is becoming a foreign land… [U]nless we handle this well, immigration of this sweep and scope can threaten our union.[15]

In his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama wrote about the anxieties that all Americans shared about the “number of immigrants added to the labor force every year” which “threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar workers.”[16]

And yet, under Presidents Clinton and Obama, and both Bushes, the U.S. foreign-born population continued to rise. Democrats generally took the position that anyone from the developing world had the established right to enter and reside in the United States without an obligation to assimilate, often justifying this position by blaming the American people for problems in the sending countries that compelled people to leave. Republicans most often put forth the proposition that America was an abstraction, an ideal. In Ronald Reagan’s terms, America was the “shining city upon a hill.”[17] Anyone who wants to pursue the American Dream can show up and instantaneously becomes an American. Just like the rest of “Us.”

In concert, both sides used immigration to undermine the middle class, decimate working Americans, and enrich and empower themselves. Of course, the American ruling class did not articulate this as the principle guiding immigration policy. What they did was to brand those who dared to criticize mass immigration for any reason as “un-American.”

America has a unique history of immigration, but immigration, properly speaking, is not what made America. It emerged from the convergence of Western Europeans and West Africans who, over the course of four centuries within the framework of Anglo-Saxon political and legal institutions, gave rise to a distinct nation with a distinct national culture. It is upon this foundation that tens of millions have arrived over the last sixty years.

It is clearly evident that contemporary America is a fractured society, and the profound, seemingly irreconcilable, disagreement over immigration lies at the center of this divide. The split is not merely partisan but cultural – between those who regard America as inseparable from its European heritage and those who seek to detach the nation from those roots. For the former, assimilation means that immigrants must embrace American history, both its triumphs and its failings, as their own. For the latter, assimilation means the conglomeration of deracinated groups into a homogenized, globalized persona, detached from traditions, culture, and historical consciousness that once defined the American nation.

A similar schism has unfolded in Europe. When millions of migrants arrived a decade ago, much of the American media framed the event as a potential turning point in history. Mainstream outlets portrayed the newcomers as refugees “yearning to be free,” whose presence would help redeem Europe from its colonial and oppressive past. The only downsides would be minimal and temporary, as previous migration from non-European countries had already demonstrated. If immigration could not erase the past sins of European history, it would at least ensure they were properly amended. Meanwhile, the perspective of ordinary European citizens was largely minimized, relevant only insofar as their governments could manage or suppress any resistance to the continuation of mass migration.

At that time, Hungary became, to use a very American expression, a “narrative disruptor.” A small, Central European country said, “No.” That defiance has a long and storied history, and it has had a long-lasting effect on the immigration debate in the West. A clear example of this effect is the close relationship between the Trump Administration and the Hungarian government, that largely grew out of their convergent views on immigration. Trump and Orban both recognized that their citizens don’t want open migration, don’t need it, and shouldn’t have it imposed upon them by their government.

Conclusion

Immigration to Western countries is not a right that everyone in non-Western countries possesses. It is a privilege citizens in those countries may choose to extend to those who wish to become part of an existing national community. Westerners should not be shy about demanding assimilation, which mean immigration must be on a scale that allows for assimilation. No other objective should receive greater consideration than this.

The phrase “the Constitution is not a suicide pact,” often attributed to Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, captures this truth vividly. To ensure it remains so, the U.S. government must fiercely defend – as all national government should – the sovereign authority of “We the People” to bar any foreign national from entry, for any reason or no reason at all, without apology.

The people of Western nations continue to welcome immigrants, and there is no reason to believe this will change. What most citizens seek, however, is controlled immigration at levels that allow for assimilation, protect national stability, and ensure that newcomers can become fully integrated members of society. What “We” want is an “Us.”

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