It is often said that the United States is a country of immigrants. In fact, in the 1960s President John F. Kennedy, the great-grandson of Irish immigrants, published a book titled A Nation of Immigrants. This label is not quite accurate, however, since we know that Native American civilizations had flourished in this land for thousands of years before the first European settlers arrived in the 1500s.

What is true is that immigration has been a central issue in determining this country’s history. The immigrant French farmer Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur in 1781 posed a famous question: What is an American? A common answer among Americans ever since is that being an American does not depend on where one’s ancestors came from. In the United States being an American depends, above all, on accepting some fundamental American ideals — representative government, rule of law, individual freedom.

Over the course of this country’s history, Americans have welcomed waves of immigrants, but often, as Hasia Diner points out in our lead essay, with a certain ambivalence toward the new arrivals. Even today immigration policy remains an issue on the mind of many Americans. In particular, the question of how to deal with illegal immigrants is the subject of much debate in the U.S. political campaign leading up to the 2008 elections. But this edition of eJournal USA is not about illegal immigrants: Our topic is how legal immigrants to the United States have assumed the identity of Americans, how generations of newcomers entered the mainstream.

There are those who say that the United States’ strength as a nation — its creativity, dynamism, and ready willingness to embrace the new — results in good part from the diversity that immigrants have brought to these shores. We agree.

—The Editors