ABSTRACT
Owing to the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural nature of the American society, American identity has long been a staple of public arena. With the upsurge of the narrative of immigrants as a threat in the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, the United States’ immigration policy became more restrictionist. Americans, politicians, and citizens alike fathomed that the new immigration waves had undermined the country’s racial homogeneity and national identity and induced the country’s decline. To them, this foreign threat was existential provoking demographic, economic, and ideological anxieties. Apart from being associated with the home-house motif, identity is harbored by the class or the clan. These two terms sometimes used interchangeably will be thoroughly investigated in concert with other terms such as set, circle, and tribe.
