American Immigration and Our National Spirit

The election of America’s first Muslim senator, Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, a second-generation immigrant from Egypt, is a watershed moment in the triumph of multiculturalism. This moment was made possible by the enduring legacy of the Johnson administration and the Hart-Celler Act, which opened the United States to large-scale immigration from the Third World in 1965. Consequently, America’s Muslim diaspora has grown from roughly 100,000 in 1960 to more than 5.5 million today.

Since 9/11 plunged America into a decades-long war on terror, the country’s Muslim population has more than doubled. As I show in a newly released report, however, the policies that have facilitated these trends are a stark departure from the old American tradition on immigration.

That tradition was rooted in the conviction that “America must be kept American.” Our forefathers recognized that too much immigration from nations that are too disparate in culture, religion, and mores would change America’s regime of natural rights, self-government, and ordered liberty into something both foreign and undesirable. On this basis, they would have viewed mass immigration from the Islamic world, and elsewhere, as a threat to our political and cultural heritage.

The naturalization acts of the early republic, which largely prohibited naturalization from outside the Western world, epitomized this policy. Together, the various writings, debates, speeches, statutes, and court opinions from that time formed the foundation of a consistent political tradition that endured for 175 years, from the Naturalization Act of 1790 until the passage of Hart-Celler in 1965.

The growing prevalence of Islamic culture presents a host of practical problems for American society, as our embrace of multiculturalism has made it impossible to accommodate Islam without altering the character of the nation itself. Many Muslim immigrants and their children reject the traditional “melting pot” settlement that integrated previous waves of immigrants into a unified American national identity.

A 2026 op-ed in The Washington Post by Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, exemplifies this view. Hamid argues against the premise that “a minority community’s right to be in the United States depends on its willingness to converge with the cultural mainstream.” In Hamid’s view, “America was not founded on the assumption that its citizens would eventually come to agree on foundational questions.”

This sentiment is widely shared by prominent Islamic organizations across America. The Council on American-Islamic Relations’ 2026 Civil Rights Report explicitly criticizes the old American tradition on immigration that sought “to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity” and all attempts to restore the vision of America as united by a “single heritage.” To this end, the report asserts the organization’s commitment to protecting Muslims’ “right to be different.”

In this same spirit, the Islamic Circle of North America declared in a statement issued on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 that it rejects “the premise that American belonging is contingent on loyalty tests or displays of patriotism.”

The Founders’ writings on immigration and Islam indicate that though they were never faced with the prospect of mass immigration from the Muslim world, they intuited the problems associated with it.

The old American tradition on immigration was predicated on an understanding of republican citizenship, which emphasized the will and desire to assimilate into our cultural and political heritage as a necessary prerequisite for naturalization. By and large, this same tradition viewed Islamic culture as incompatible with a free society and the principles of republican government.

If America is to preserve our national heritage, we must reject the post-1965 settlement that is facilitating the transformation of our society and recover the old American tradition on immigration rooted in the Founders’ theory of republican citizenship.

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