1. I have a problem with "their country". What makes this any country any more "their" than anybody else's?
2. Does their past and often even current behavior towards other immigrants deserve any gratitude?
2. Does their past and often even current behavior towards other immigrants deserve any gratitude?
People who share kinship ties and cultural ties built the physical and political world of the country. My wife’s family fought in the American revolution, and settled the Oregon coast. All the rugged frontier individualism that permeates American culture is her people. By contrast my family came here on a plane I. 1989. My ancestors contributed nothing to this country. This country’s culture, institutions, etc., bear none of their imprint. If they had, this would be a very different country. We have a whole country that they made but it’s not this one.
Germans, Dutch, Norwegians, and Swedes settled the midwest, which was a key to the development of American society and government. They were a backbone of the Republican Party during the Civil War. Iowa, full of recent German immigrants at the time, contributed more soldiers per capita to the union than any other state. To this day, midwestern speech patterns are full of German or Norwegian influences. There's 50 million German Americans--more than half as many as in Germany.
Italians and Irish had major impacts on the culture and politics of the nation's largest cities. They changed the course of the 20th century by supporting the Democratic Party by large margins from FDR until Reagan, which took the country in a very different direction from the original vision created by the British founders. There's more Irish people in America than in Ireland.
Other European immigrant groups had localized impacts, but never shaped the country the way these other groups did.
I was mostly objecting to your simplified division of people into those "correct" groups whose country this is and those who are foreigners that don't belong here (I know you did not use these words, but that's how your comments sounded to me). I come from a place that has a long history of sentiments like that, and as far as I can tell, there was never anything good coming out of them.
So when is the cut-off date for having "built the physical and political world of the country"? My ancestors (on different branches of the family tree) came here in the mid- to late-19th century and early 20th century — to what extent do their contributions count?
2. Yes.