Nations of Immigrants: Do Words Matter?

Abstract

perhaps it is unfair, but i often ask my undergraduate students a trick question. The question is “What country in the world, in the year 2000, had the highest proportion of foreigners living on its national territory?” It is probably no surprise that the largest number of them answer “the United States.” When asked to explain, the least articulate students give the most revealing responses. They tend to report, accurately, that “everyone knows that the United States is a ‘nation of immigrants.’” Students are then surprised to learn that the correct answer to the question is not the United States but the United Arab Emirates, where 85 percent of the resident population in 2000 was foreign-born and where most foreigners worked on short-term labor contracts with the expectation they would return home again. Is the United Arab Emirates a nation of immigrants? My students do not think so, and neither do most of the leaders or natives of the United Arab Emirates. Switzerland, a country that has a longer history of importing temporary labor, today has a resident population of about 23 percent foreigners—almost twice the comparable figure for the foreign-born of the United States in 2000 (12.5 percent). Most Swiss vigorously deny they are a “nation of immigrants,” while many Americans insist on it (HoffmannNowotny 302). In 2005, again based on shares of population rather than numbers, the United States does not even make it into the top ten worldwide (Migration Policy Institute). Clearly, it is not just a matter of numbers. Although unfair, my trick question is a good way to open discussion. What difference does it make if we call someone a foreigner, an immigrant, an emigrant, a migrant, a refugee, an alien, an exile, or an illegal or clandestine? To ponder this question is to explore the vastly differing ways that human population movements figure in nation-building and in the historical imagi-