Re: This is confusing
"I fail to understand why so many people in America have to describe themselves as though they are still a national of whichever country they or their parents migrated from"
As an American, I have no idea. Perhaps it's because most of us descend from immigrants (the real history of America was with the original inhabitants, but they are marginalized and don't count). As a country, we don't have much history. Perhaps it's because few other tribal groups are options, clans etc. didn't transplant en masse. So we have ersatz clans, much like football fans do. Perhaps it's an attempt to have pedigrees. We mostly don't know much about our ancestors who are more than a few generations removed, those ties were broken when they immigrated.
Don't you (wherever "you" are) create real or imagined ties to the past? Do they go back before, say, 1800?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
