The war between Hamas and Israel is forcing everyone to recognise an uncomfortable truth: immigration is a foreign policy issue.
In Germany, as crowds of Hamas supporters took to the streets, Henry Kissinger told Welt TV: “It was a grave mistake to let in so many people with a completely different culture, religion and ideas, because it creates a pressure group in every country that does that.
Americans have also been shocked to see anti-Israel demonstrations in Britain – and to find that college campuses in our country are deeply polarised by the bloodshed in the Middle East.
At the end of the Cold War, liberals thought they could have it both ways: They would make America more like the rest of the world while conducting foreign policy as if it were still the same country that entered World War II in 1941.
The Ellis Island era of immigration brought millions of newcomers from Ireland, Italy and Central Europe to our shores in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Germans had been the largest part of an earlier wave in the 19th century.
The internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II is well known – but German-Americans and Italian-Americans were also treated as suspects and, in some cases, interned.
Today, these measures seem like a shameful overreach.
But one reason America was slow to get involved in both world wars was demographic.
It’s far from the case that ordinary German-Americans or Italian-Americans were pro-Hitler or supporters of Kaiser Wilhelm in the First World War – but they weren’t pro-British either.
And did Irish Americans want to bleed to save the British Empire?
On the other hand, of course, Jewish Americans were well aware of the suffering of their relatives and co-religionists at the hands of the Nazis.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States – relieving Franklin Roosevelt of the burden of trying to manoeuvre US policy within the constraints of American demography.
During the Cold War, the national origins of many second- and third-generation Americans helped to invest us in the fate of Europe: Polish Americans, for example, cared deeply about the plight of their countrymen under communist rule.
Religion contributed to America’s sense of mission: Jews felt the oppression of fellow Jews in the Soviet Union, and Catholics, whose numbers had been boosted by immigration from southern and central Europe a generation earlier, were members of an international church struggling with communism on every continent.
America had always been a majority Christian country, but the Cold War with the militantly atheist Soviet Union renewed Americans’ religious faith – Congress and President Dwight Eisenhower added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.
The rise of evangelical Christianity cemented America’s commitment to Israel, and while Hebrew was the official language of the state founded in 1948, the European roots of many of Israel’s Jews were similar to those of millions of Americans.
But what happens when fewer Americans have European roots?
What happens when America’s mainline Christian churches decline, while immigration makes the US more religiously fragmented than ever?
As a nation of immigrants of recent European descent, America’s deep involvement in European affairs, from the Cold War to the war in Ukraine, is not surprising.
Nor is it surprising that a majority Protestant country should feel a special affinity with Israel.
Liberals like to think of themselves as internationalists, both in their concern about conflicts around the world and in their support for mass immigration – but in fact American internationalism has been shaped by the national origins of Americans themselves.
Change those national origins, as liberal immigration policies have done, and American internationalism will change – or collapse.
In the conflict with Hamas, most Americans support Israel.
But support for Israel is lowest among the youngest American adults, who are the most diverse in national origin and the least Christian in religion.
Islam is one of the fastest growing religions in America, although at present Jews still outnumber Muslims.
Yet our future is unlikely to look like Germany’s present: What’s most significant here is simply the weakening of the demographics – religious affiliations and national origins – that have driven America’s engagement with the world for the past hundred years.
Perhaps new immigration from India and East Asia will push American internationalism in new directions.
Or perhaps the diversification of our national roots and religious identities will simply mean that it’s much harder for Americans to agree on a foreign policy direction.
Either way, if the strongest supporters of Israel and America’s commitment to European security are to prevail in the future, they will have to curb immigration today.
