Donald Trump Slams Joe Biden’s Claim That ‘America Was an Idea’

Donald Trump’s stump speech includes a slam against Joe’s Biden’s post-modern vision of the United States as an idea, not a country.

“Joe Biden goes out and says the other day that America is nothing more than an idea,” Trump said at an October 25 rally in New Hampshire.

‘No. America is a great country. That’s what it is. It’s a great country. And you can’t have a great country unless you have borders,” he said before touting the construction of the border wall.

He continued:

We stand on the shoulders of American heroes who crossed the oceans, settled the continent, tamed the wilderness, laid down the railroads, raised up the skyscrapers, won two world wars, defeated fascism and communism, and made America the single greatest nation in the history of the world. And the best is yet to come. … We are one movement, one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God,” he said as he completed his speech.

Trump’s emphasis on civic solidarity was directed at Biden’s post-modern claims that the United States is an “idea” or a “nation of immigrants.”

“America was an idea, an idea,” Biden said in an October 21 podcast. “’We hold these truths to be self-evident.’ We’ve never lived up to it, but we’ve never walked away from it before.”

Biden’s declaration that Americans owe a moral debt to illegals came just a week after he insisted on October 15 that all Americans are merely immigrants instead of native-born citizens in their own country:

We are a country that is a country of slaves who came here 400 years ago, indigenous people, and everyone else is an immigrant. And we’re a diverse country. Unless we are able to treat people equally, we’re just never going to meet our potential.

Biden’s view is included in his 2020 immigration platform, titled, “The Biden Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants.”

Biden’s 2020 plan promises to let companies import more visa workers, to let mayors import temporary workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain migration migrants, to end migration enforcement against illegal aliens unless they commit a felony, and to dramatically accelerate the inflow of poor refugees to at least 125,000 per year.

The United States is a “Nation of Immigrants” claim was promoted in the late 1950s by then-Sen. John Kennedy, as low immigration forced employers to compete for workers with offers of higher wages. In October 2018, Breitbart reported Rep. Joe Kennedy’s description of the claim:

Few felt it as deeply as President John F. Kennedy. In his 1964 book A Nation of Immigrants, recently re-released, my great-uncle outlines the compelling case for immigration, in economic, moral, and global terms. “The abundant resources of this land provided the foundation for a great nation,” he writes. “But only people could make the opportunity a reality. Immigration provided the human resources.”

In contrast, Trump’s 2020 plan offers broadly popular — but quite limited — pro-American restrictions on migration and visa workers. For example, in many speeches, Trump ignores the economic impact of blue-collar and white-collar migration on Americans while stressing issues of crime, outsiders, diseases, or welfare, even though his low-immigration policies have been a popular boon to Americans.

Open-ended legal migration is praised by business and progressives partly because migrants’ arrival helps transfer wealth from wage-earners to stockholders.

Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.

Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, short-change labor in the cities, impose tight control on American professionals, centralize technological innovation, undermine labor rights, and to get many left-wing reporters to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities.