ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that three distinct things can be seen as essential to the basis on which demographic and thereby political domination was established in the USA. They are: the drawing of the frontiers of the country, enclosing areas it now associates with the USA while leaving other zones aside; the strict limitation in the years after the First World War of immigration from areas deemed to harbour undesirable populations; the manipulation of the boundaries of identity to incorporate and co-opt groups into the Anglo-Saxon core. The chapter argues that the United States has no core ethnic group and that, therefore, one cannot speak of such a group dominating its territory and political institutions. The Northern border was a matter of successive tensions and treaties with Great Britain as the colonial power in Canada, culminating in the Oregon Treaty of 1846 and the acquisition of the North West. The Southern and Western boundaries emerged from a more complex process.
