I was afraid I had lost track of Philip Bump, the former Washington Post writer. He stopped posting on his blog some additional thoughts back in March, and when I would see him on All In With Chris Hayes, they said he was now with something called CT Insider. What the heck is that?
Well, I guess it's a publication in Connecticut? I still don't get it, but I guess he gets to write what he wants, like this: My family has been here since 1621. That is not what makes me American.
He's a data guy, so he made some cool graphics showing how young this country is, based on things like his own patrinomial lineage and this one of the U.S. presidents, where just four overlapping presidents' lifetimes get us back to 1776:
(Click to enlarge.)
John Adams to Grant to FDR to Biden. That's all it takes to cover 250 years.
More importantly for the point of the article, he wrote:
... in 2024, about 25% of immigrants to the United States had arrived before 1990. A quarter of immigrants, then, had been here for at least 1 out of every 7 years that the U.S. has existed.
About 16% of immigrants in the U.S. last year arrived before 1984, the year [J.D.] Vance was born. In other words, they've been here longer than Vance himself. And yet they for some reason supposedly have less purchase on the nation's identity and values than does he?
Many of my own ancestors arrived in Rhode Island (and Massachusetts and Long Island) in the 1630s, so not quite as early as Bump's, but close.
I have no patience with ladder-pullers like Vance, let alone recent immigrant-descendants like Stephen Miller, Samuel Alito, or Donald Trump, whose own grandmother was six months pregnant with his father when she arrived in the U.S.! It's a big country, made better by the presence of immigrants.
Learn to share, as taught in the religions you supposedly belong to.
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