This seems to be a recurring question in the history of the United States and one that resonates even more strongly since Donald Trump returned to power with his restrictive immigration policies.

Precisely with that question, Daniel Greene, assistant professor of History at Northwestern University in Illinois, titled an article published in that country's Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

“Although the United States has welcomed millions of immigrants, the country's history is also full of examples of immigration restrictions,” he noted in “What does it mean to be a land of immigrants?“.

In 1958, then-senator and future president John F. Kennedy wrote the essay “A Nation of Immigrants,” in which she highlighted the fundamental role of immigrants in shaping the country and proposed the need to reform its immigration policy.

The phrase “A Nation of Immigrants” has become popular over the years in different areas of American society.

“We tell ourselves stories as a nation. One of them is that we are a land of immigrants. But, in times of crisis, we often find it difficult to deliver on the promises made in those stories,” Greene wrote.

“In fact, as historian Peter Hayes says in 'America and the Holocaust,' keeping immigrants out of the country has been 'as American as apple pie.'”

So, has the United States really been a A country open to immigration? Is Trump's current harsh policy so unusual?

A centuries-long debate

According to Greene, almost since the country's founding, Americans "have debated who should be included or excluded."

"As early as 1798,The Alien and Sedition Acts sought to deport immigrants and shut down some immigrant-owned printing presses for fear they would spread threatening ideas.”

Aviva Chomsky, a history professor and coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts, wrote in Le Monde Diplomatique in 2016 that “from its earliest moments, American history has been a history of deportation.”

“The United States was founded by a group of British people who exemplified English colonialism of a very specific kind: settler colonialism,” she tells BBC Mundo.

In traditional colonialism, the historian explains, the imperialists’ goal was typically to send “a small group of bureaucrats to establish their power over a native population,” but in settler colonialism the goal of the colonizers was “to eliminate the native population and form a new country, one made by the colonizers.”

And so, he points out, the struggle for independence was not really an anti-colonial struggle, but one that sought to strengthen the power of those who arrived as colonizers.

Many of those who led the independence cause were landowners, and there were also land speculators looking to increase their holdings.

“After they achieved independence, they continued with the colonial project, with their expansion, with slavery, with the deportation of indigenous populations, and the genocide against them.”

“In settler colonialism, the first deportations were of the native population to whiten the country and make a white country in a land where the majority of the population was native and black.”

The idea was to build “a country for some and that some is a racialized concept, a white concept.”

The differences

For Professor Chomsky, “when people say that the United States has always welcomed immigrants, they are hiding the reality of who was welcomed, under what conditions and why.”

And the fact is - she explains - in countries where there was settler colonialism, “colonizing immigrants were welcomed” to help populate the country.

“Until the Civil War, Africans were welcomed, who were brought there by force and without rights.”

The first major law to prohibit the Immigration to the United States occurred when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which suspended the immigration of Chinese workers for ten years.

That legislation and "the restrictions that followed froze the Chinese community in 1882 and prevented them from progressing and assimilating into American society as European immigrant groups were able to do," indicates the report "Immigration" on the website of the United States Library of Congress.

Experts see this legislation as a starting point for understanding many aspects of American immigration policy throughout history.

For Gordon Chang, a professor at Stanford University, the legacy of these restrictions is that they were "the first directed at a specific ethnic group and confirmed the idea that the United States was a land where some races are preferred and others not."

"The idea that the United States is a land for all immigrants has always been a fiction, although a very popular and affectionate one," Chang noted in a 2017 BBC Mundo article.

A legal battle

In this so-called "era of exclusion" it was the case of a cook of Chinese parents that was key in consolidating the right to citizenship by birth as a law in the United States.

The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which had been ratified in 1868, established that all people born or naturalized in that country were citizens.

This amendment sought to end the discrimination that African Americans suffered in several states that denied them citizenship status.

Upon returning from a trip, the cook Wong Kim Ark, who had been born in 1873 in San Francisco, They barred him from entering the United States and detained him on the ship.

A group of lawyers filed a lawsuit claiming that his rights as an American were being violated.

The case reached the Supreme Court, which in a landmark 1898 ruling declared that Wong was a natural-born American citizen, regardless of his parents' immigration status or origins.

That verdict represented the triumph of a crucial principle for ensuring social integration and equality for the children of immigrants.

The right to birthright citizenship is currently being challenged by the Trump administration.

Experts like Chomsky see a connection between the establishment of the right to birthright citizenship and the initiation of measures to limit the arrival of some immigrants.

A path of restrictions

For Ana Raquel Minian, an associate professor of history at Stanford University, the Chinese Exclusion Act “threatened the very foundations of American citizenship” as defined by the 14th Amendment.

Furthermore, The ban on Chinese immigrants laid the groundwork for further immigration restrictions.

This is what he wrote in “America Is a Nation of Immigrants That Has Not Lived Up to Its Promise,” an essay in The New York Times.

“In the late 19th century, increasing numbers of Eastern and Southern Europeans began arriving in the United States. American lawmakers feared that these newcomers, considered racially inferior, would taint the country’s racial heritage.”

In response to this concern, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which introduced immigrant quotas according to their country of origin, "which gave preference to Northern and Western Europeans and almost completely banned entry to Asians."

That quota system ended with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, but also introduced other restrictive measures, such as quotas for immigrants from countries in the Western Hemisphere.

Recent History

One hundred and twenty-seven years after the historic ruling in the Wong chef case, President Trump believes that children of non-resident aliens born in the United States should not automatically receive U.S. citizenship.

Trump has promised to "keep Americans safe," "protect the homeland," and fight against irregular immigration. Six months after returning to the White House, the administration claims it has "restored law and order" to the immigration system.

During his election campaign, the Republican spoke of promoting the "largest deportation operation in the history of the United States."

Professor Chomsky argues that while the president may "differ from other politicians by openly expressing his antipathy toward certain types of immigrants," his policies are not new and to understand them we must, in part, go back to two Democratic administrations.