Over 200 years ago, when the United States was created, the Founding Fathers gave Americans the most precious gift they could think of, the chance, every four years, to start over. No matter how dire the situation, how grim the outlook, the election of a new president offers the chance to wipe the slate clean, for the country that's always been about reinventing itself to be born again. Thank you, Nebraska! This is one of those moments. I will be honoured to accept your nomination for vice President of the United States. This is the year when Americans are asking the big questions. What kind of nation are we? Who can take us to a better place? Who is a true American leader anyway? Fight with me! Fight with me! Fight for what's right for our country! Fight for the ideal ...

So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that, this year, the contenders aren't the usual suspects. ...that Barack Obama is our candidate... This is the great tribal ritual of American democracy, the party convention. This year, we saw something immensely moving and utterly different from any other moment I've ever seen in my life. Someone from Kenya, Kansas, Hawaii, who represents America in all its colours, all its varieties, got to be put in nomination as the Presidential Candidate of one of the great parties of the United States. Barack Obama has stretched beyond anything that was thought possible, the definition of who can be an American President. It's time for us to change America. The dream that any American might make it to the White House reflects the oldest and noblest American ideal. But it's been the hardest to realise. For, throughout its history, America has struggled with the question of just what is an American? ...standing up for the freedom of my people. "He is an American who, on leaving behind  all his ancient prejudices and manners," "begins to feel a resurrection. His heart swells and glows." Here man is free, as he ought to be." That was the voice of the man who, right at the start of America's history, saw the New World as something blazingly different.

A society of free immigrants. The wanderers of the globe, the most despised, powerless, destitute of people, would, in this New World, become the best of all men and women, citizens. And who voiced this idea, the one that would inspire millions to come to America to be reborn as free men and women? A French nobleman, transplanted to the New World as a working farmer, Hector Saint John de Crevecoeur. In a wonderful epiphany, Crevecoeur realised the true meaning of the American Revolution, the creation of a new society from the downtrodden of the Earth. In his book published in the 1780s, Crevecoeur wrote that here individuals of all nations are turned into a new race of men. It didn't matter who you'd been or where you'd been born. Now your allegiance wasn't to a religion or a birthplace. It was to an idea, the idea of liberty and equality. People all over the Old World read Crevecoeur and headed for the new life he'd promised. A wonderful idea, wasn't it? One that would be America's reason to boast of being unique in the world.

But, would it actually happen? Of course, back in Crevecoeur's day, the immigrants were European and white. But the American story wouldn't stay like that. His promise that anyone could become a free American spoke to all races. And that's where the trouble started. Citizenship has never been handed to immigrants on a plate. Generation after generation have had to fight for the right to be called American. Today it's the Hispanics from Mexico and Central America who are fighting to be accepted. When we say Somos America, we are America, every one of us. Mestizo, mixed-bloods, half-bloods, indigenous, black, white, brown, yellow, we are America. For decades, people have crossed the Mexican border in search of a better life, many of them illegally. There are already 45 million Hispanics in the United States, and by the year 2050, they'll make up a third of the country. They're changing America. For some Americans, that means the end of their United States. The greatest thing we have to combat is the fear people have of the other. When they don't really want to look at you and say this is another human being. And we don't need to be fearful. We need to embrace each other in our diversity and honour them. In a brutal time for the American economy, with jobs at a premium, questions like, Who are the real Americans? Take on a panicky intensity. John McCain! John McCain has long been on the liberal side of the immigration debate, wanting to find a way for illegal immigrants to become citizens. But when he needed the support of the conservatives in his party, his policy became all about border fences and crackdowns. My friends, I want to look you in the eye and tell ya, I know what the message is.

The message is, we must secure our borders. I will secure our borders. As President of the United States, I will secure our borders. And I know how to do it. This is the kind of American city where McCain could smell white insecurity about the future. Houston, Texas, where a third of the city is Hispanic. And where some white Texans get hot and bothered about being swamped by a Latino tide. ALL: Pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. These volunteers gather every week to protect the kind of America they want to live in. The group is run by Curtis Collier, a pest exterminator. There is an estimated 30 to 40 million people in our country illegally, and when you start multiplying that, just by a few dollars, I mean, if 40 million people only cost you one dollar, it'd be costing you 40 million, but, uh, it is estimated that a single illegal alien costs taxpayers, uh, somewhere in the neighbourhood of about $4,000 a year. As far as America needing the labourers to do the work that people here won't do, what happens is, these people that come to this country actually keep the wages down. Their targets are the Mexican migrant workers who stand at the roadside waiting to be offered a day's work. I don't mind one nation, one flag, one language. That's right. I think that's right. But, over there, they got a cardboard with the word "Nail 'em and jail 'em." But, these guys, all of us, we are just feeding our families. You're all very illegal. Not everybody illegal. Show us papers and we'll help you get work. You have no authority to challenge my papers. We got authority. We're citizens.

Yeah, well, I am a citizen, too. Guys like him, guys like me, a lot of guys, we've got family here, born here. Many of us are citizens, so... And... What about the ones that aren't citizens? What about the ones standing here that are invaders? What do you want to do with them? Yeah, well, l-l-I... I guess it's right. You need to get the invaders to go home. But jail them? I don't think that's fair. You know, we are humans. Illegal invasion is illegal. Yeah, but we are humans. I don't give a care what you are. If you're not an American citizen, you ain't got the right to be in America. Get the hell out! They're in our country illegally, they're not paying their taxes, they're bringing in numerous diseases, they're raping and killing people. Um, if they don't find a job, they go out and steal and rob. Americans are fed up. It's... They're ruining our country. It's no longer a country for us. They even say that Texas belongs to them. They said that we stole it from them, and I know... I had relatives who came down here from Tennessee and fought for the Republic of Texas and won it, fairly and squarely. And now they're saying, "This is our country. Y'all stole it from us,""" which is not true. In their nightmares, the vigilantes see themselves making a last stand against a mass invasion, sweeping across the unguarded border. But when Texas first became American, when the United States became off-white, the invasion was all the other way round. In the 1820s, thousands of immigrants came to the borderlands of Texas, then part of Mexico, in search of a better life. They weren't Mexicans. They were white Anglo-Americans. They'd been invited here by the Mexican government to bring prosperity to a largely empty and arid land.

Now, gentlemen, in signing for your land, I must remind you that you are agreeing to certain conditions of the Mexican government here. First, that you must improve and cultivate the land. But before long, they outnumbered native Mexicans ten to one, and had built a little America with their own customs, language and religion. Fearing it would lose Texas, the Mexican government shut the border and tried to impose its will on the rebellious immigrants. The response of the American settlers, on March the 2nd, 1836, was to declare independence from Mexico. War was the only option left to the Mexicans to reclaim their Texas. People around here like to say that everything in Texas is really big. And when you see a monument this colossal, you know it's got to be important, not just for the history of Texas, but for the history of the country. But to tell the truth, the Battle of San Jacinto, fought on April the 21st, 1836, wasn't that much of a battle at all. The Texans under General Sam Houston simply fell upon the Mexican army as it was taking its afternoon snooze, massacring almost seven hundred of them to just two Texan fatalities. But if the battle itself wasn't that important, the results certainly were. The scale of the rout suddenly made it seem that Mexico was a soft kill. And it wasn't going to be long before a land grab south of the border became well-nigh irresistible. The walkover in Texas fed American ambition. It confirmed to all red-blooded Americans that this was their continent, this was their time, and no inferior races were going to stand in their way. Manifest Destiny was the new cry heard right across America. The idea that America's racial superiority made it her God given right to expand across the continent.

What was called America's Anglo-Saxon superiority would make victory a certainty. The American popular press now began a relentless campaign to fulfill this Manifest Destiny by taking on the weak and inferior Republic of Mexico, and the politicians responded with vigour. In 1845, Congress annexed Texas. The problem was Mexicans still thought of Texas as theirs. And so, after a little skirmish on the border, the now inevitable Mexican-American War began on the plains of Palo Alto outside Brownsville, Texas. It's revealing to hear why the young American soldiers thought they were fighting. One, Creed Taylor, recalled, "I thought I could shoot Mexicans as well as I could shoot Indians" or deer or turkey, and so I rode away to war. Another, Sydenham Moore, said simply "It's an outrage for Mexicans to own such a country, as they are too lazy and make" few improvements in civilisation." America's victory over Mexico was absolute. Over half of pre-War Mexico, including California, New Mexico and Arizona, was now annexed by the United States. And with that land came tens of thousands of Mexicans. And so the fantasy of a purely white America came to an end, not through immigration, but through the shifting borders of conquest. The Mexicans who lived in the annexed lands now found themselves in a foreign country. The treaty ending the war was supposed to make these Mexican-Americans equal citizens, but the reality was that they were reduced to being landless, casual labourers.

For generations, they weren't considered true Americans at all. Yet today, Mexican-Americans have found their own place among the people of the modern United States. They're the majority on the southern border, where a person's identity can be both Mexican and American. Jesus, Arturo, Alberto and their friends in the Chicken Club may have lived in Brownsville, Texas most of their lives, but they still speak only Spanish, and this makes many Anglo-Americans suspicious. Yet they're fiercely loyal to America, the country that's given them everything. Theirs is the classic immigrant story, leaving the country of your birth to make it in America, just as Crevecoeur promised. Hundreds of thousands of Hispanics still come every year. But it's not just that they need America. America needs them. It's only Hispanics who'll do this kind of work. Long hours in the heat of the Californian sun, for $ 12 an hour. Rod Braga owns over 4,000 acres of prime land in Salinas, California, which has earned itself the nickname of "America's Salad Bowl." He employs five hundred mostly Mexican workers, some new migrants, others now American. The country's much stronger with the fact that we're constantly getting this inflow of young, hard-working, industrious men and women who, you know, are willing to work 70, 80 hours a week. People coming from China or people coming from Mexico, or from other parts of Asia, wherever, you know, they're always the hardest working people in those countries that want to get out and make a better life for themselves and they come here and they add that to the United States. Rod's ancestors were immigrants, too. His grandfather came from Switzerland and built up the farm.

And just as his family quickly became Americans, so, Rod believes, will his Mexican workers. If you talk to any immigrants from anywhere, once there here, you know, they're... Of course, they're probably proud of their own culture and history and their countries, but, seems to me, everybody I run across, you know, they believe that they're American, in their way. There's a lot of worrying, some of it angry, that Hispanic immigrants are taking work from white Americans, and that the sheer weight of their numbers will change America forever. But Rod Braga accepts that, too, as an American story. It's not something that worries me. I mean, I think countries that don't change and progress are far worse off, so, you know, there'll be change, and there'll be some difficulties, but, in the end, you know, it's... We've changed in the last 200 years, we'll continue to change for the next 200, I would imagine. Sometimes, though, the process of becoming American could be tragic, and no one knew that better than the Chinese. Today, they're so much part of America's success story, that it's hard to imagine that not so long ago they were looked on as clownish sub-humans, the ching-chong Chinamen. Time and again, America's whites have feared the change immigrants bring, even though it's often been immigrant toil and sweat that's made America. And so it was 150 years ago, when the Chinese first came to America. The Chinese came to California in search of gold. But when they were chased away from the gold fields, they had to look for other work, building railroads. At first, the tough Irish foremen didn't think the Chinese had what it took. They were too slight, they said, their lack of body hair a sign of their effeminate nature.

But the railroad companies were on an epic mission to create a line that would cross the entire continent. And they were on a strict deadline. If they blew it, funds allocated by Congress would dry up. So, the need for labourers was critical. But workers were hard to find, especially in 1865, when the line had to cross the Sierra Nevada. At Donner Pass, near Truckee, California, the railroad had to rise to 7,000 feet. It was one of the most ambitious feats of engineering Americans had ever attempted. This may look like a picture-postcard perfect day in the Sierra Nevada, but in the winter of 1866 it would have looked very different. Forty-foot snowdrifts and, underneath all that snow, thousands of Chinese in work gangs, trying to get a Central Pacific Railroad through the mass of granite. Now, normally, this was a crazy idea. You would have stopped work in winter conditions like that and started again in the spring. But the Chinese were prepared to do it. The only way they could and still live was by sinking chimneys and airshafts right through the snowpack and living in tunnels dimly lit by lanterns. We will never know how many died in that Herculean effort but this we do know. If you think, and I do, that it was the Transcontinental Railroad that made modern America one, then it was the Chinese that made modern America. During the critical winter of 1866-7, between 10,000 and 12,000 Chinese men were at work on the Central Pacific Railroad. There were many ways to die for the Central Pacific, avalanches, flying boulders, standing too close to the explosions of nitroglycerin. Yet the Chinese kept on going, exceeding all the expectations of their bosses. Progress across the Sierra was painfully slow. At Donner Pass, it averaged only eight inches a day.

Summit Tunnel, 1,600 feet long, would take over a year to complete. Walking into this tunnel, shredded, torn, scorched rock, is a walk into the hell of history, really. The heroic work the Chinese did, blasting their way through this mountain. It seems really inconceivable that this could have been done, even with the help of nitroglycerin, by human hands at all. The scale of it is, sort of, epic. It must be one of the great achievements of American history, and yet there's absolutely nothing to mark the tenacity and the suffering and the endurance. No plaque, no little museum. But hey, after all, they were Chinese. They weren't even thought of as Americans. On May the 10th, 1869, workers posed for the photograph in Promontory, Utah, to celebrate the completion of the first railway link right across the continent. Yet there are no Chinese faces. Only the Irish and European labourers were invited to take part. The Chinese may have helped unify the United States, but that wasn't enough to make them American. Once the railroad was completed, the Chinese looked for work in the Chinatowns of the western cities, but many whites viewed them with growing suspicion. When recession hit in the 1870s, they were accused of taking work from white Americans and things turned ugly. In San Francisco, an Irish-American labour organiser, Dennis Kearney, had vast crowds chanting, The Chinese must go. Lynchings and the burning of Chinatowns soon followed all across the western states. In Truckee, where many of those who had taken the railroad through the mountain had settled, the anti-Chinese campaign was led by Charles McGlashan, a former high school teacher and now the owner of the local newspaper.

McGlashan professed to want to avoid violence, not least because burning the Chinese out hadn't worked, they just kept on rebuilding their homes. So, instead of the torch, he planned to strangle Truckee's Chinatown to death with a tightening economic noose. He wouldn't target the Chinese directly, but the whites who gave them a livelihood. White homes that employed Chinese servants, hotels that hired them to cook and clean, timber companies that used them to cut wood. They would all be ordered to fire their Chinese workers. And McGlashan's weapon to enforce this boycott would, in a very modern twist, be his newspaper. This stuff is really amazing. There's evil dripping from the pages of this obscure provincial newspaper. This kind of language to dehumanise the Chinese, you just don't think of as having a place anywhere in America. But here it is. Here's McGlashan right on the eve of the boycott. Very grand in mobilising contempt. "It will be a bitter, relentless warfare unto the death. No quarter will be asked or given." "Either the whites will rule Truckee and the Chinese must leave, or the Chinese must rule" and the whites will leave. "There will be no compromise, no flag of truce, no cessation of hostilities" until the final surrender is made." Now, what does he mean by the final surrender? He means the entire community is going to be uprooted, evicted, all traces of their having been part of Truckee wiped out completely. And here's McGlashan ostracising anyone he calls a Chinese lover, anyone who would defy the campaign of hatred against the Chinese. This is what he says. Extraordinary. He says, "How dare they think that they could gain a livelihood for themselves "without the aid of the thieving, lustful, opium-smoking, murderous Chinamen."

There can be no standing on the fence, McGlashan says. Apparently not. Well, it turns my stomach to actually read this kind of thing because the degree of venom, the spewing out of this sort of race hatred... We're all used to reading the history of the war between black and white in the South and that particular tragedy. We don't really want to think of America, the country of the Statue of Liberty, the country of immigration, as having as a deep strand in its history the sense in which Asiatics, who had helped build America, could never be Americans, in fact, could never really be human at all. One after another, Truckee's businesses capitulated to his blackmail. Threats to tar and feather anyone who continued to work with the Chinese helped the boycott become a great success. On February the 13th, 1886, Charles McGlashan declared victory in his campaign to cleanse Truckee from the Chinese. He called for a night of what he said would be "hallelujah" and "rejoicing" and the entire town poured into the plaza. There were bonfires on the hillsides, fife and drum bands, round after round of shouts of joy. It had taken just nine weeks and thereafter the hitherto obscure town of Truckee became a byword for how to get rid of your unwanted Chinese. By the end of 1886, Truckee's Chinatown had become a ghost town. Little trace was left of its once vibrant community of 1,500 people. The jubilant McGlashan took his campaign across the West, boasting of the success of the "Truckee methodˇ± in evicting the Chinese. He became known as "The Hero of Truckee." The same year that the Chinese were being driven out of their homes, the icon of the American dream was being dedicated in New York Harbour. On its base would be inscribed Emma Lazarus' famous poem, "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses" yearning to be free, "The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Just so long, she might have added, as they weren't Chinese. In an act of craven surrender to the mobs and the boycotts, the United States government enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act, that barred all but a few Chinese from entering the country. But such was the power of the Crevecoeur dream that thousands still made the journey, only to end up in the detention centre at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, awaiting almost inevitable deportation. On arrival, inmates were given an exhaustive examination. These were often invasive and humiliating. Since, to Western eyes they all looked the same, all parts of their bodies were measured and photographed, the shape of their heads, the length of their arms and feet, the condition of their genitals. Remarkably, these walls are covered with that quintessentially Chinese form, the poem. They're full of a sense of pain and sorrow and of injustice of being held, literally, at bay. Listen to this one. "

America has power, but not justice. In prison, we were victimised" as if we were guilty. "Given no opportunity to explain, it was really brutal. I bow my head in reflection," but there's nothing I can do." Even while they were officially barred, many Chinese did manage to enter the United States illegally. Thousands were smuggled across the Mexican border, dressed as Mexicans. The people for whom the Crevecoeur promise had been most bitterly betrayed had found their own way to make it come true. Yet, at the turn of the century, on the other side of United States, Crevecoeur's dream was very much alive. Millions came, escaping destitution and persecution, from Sicily, Armenia, Poland, Jews from all over Eastern Europe. This was an experiment no other country in the world had ever tried, much less accomplished, to somehow forge a great continental democracy from so many different tribes. Yet, as with the Chinese, many Americans reacted with fear, that the sturdy Anglo-Saxon character of America would be destroyed by the inferior newcomers. It was an anxiety that reached right into America's elite. The pages of New England's history remind all good Americans of the unwavering tenacity of the little band of refugees who, more than 300 years ago, founded a nation in a strange and hostile world. To our nettage, these honoured dead have brought a quality of endurance that has had a lasting influence on the American character, and the American way of life. These earnest settlers founded Harvard College in 1636. Some of the nation's top Ivy League professors founded the Immigration Restriction League. And they published academic papers showing the race stock of the country was being adulterated by immigrant hordes.

The League campaigned for restrictions on immigration to ensure the survival of the true Nordic and Anglo-Saxon character of America. But industry, at the height of its powers, didn't feel the same way. New immigrants could be turned into ideal assembly line workers. At the Ford Motor Company, three-quarters of the labour force was foreign born. So immigration restriction would be bad for business, and that would be bad for America. A hundred years ago, men working on the Ford Motor Company assembly line would have been toiling in grime and oil for long hours and low wages. So, it's no wonder that the company couldn't keep the workforce. Then Henry Ford came up with what he called a revolutionary idea. Why not use the company profits to almost double the wages? But for Ford, it wasn't just about the money. It was the beginning of a great experiment in social engineering. We want to make men in our factories, he said, not just automobiles. Despite needing the immigrants for his factory floor, Ford felt as strongly as anyone that the alien culture of the immigrants threatened the purity of the American character. He'd been brought up on a farm and wanted the values of that older America to survive in the Industrial Age. Somehow, the newcomers had to be Americanised, the Old World cleaned out of them. So, to get their wage increase, those who made the Model T would have to show they were model Americans. Ford created a company sociological department, with a staff of 160 investigators to spy on his workforce. They drove around the immigrant neighbourhoods of Detroit, armed with interpreters and questionnaires, monitoring the behaviour of his workers. A whiff of whisky?

Suspicions of too many lodgers? Underwear not dazzlingly clean? Forget the wage increase. The assumption was that immigrants were dirty, lazy and immoral and only the surveillance of the Ford Sociological Department could save them and America. But even if you lived like a saint, you'd still be penalised where it hurt, in the wage packet, if your English, the essential tool of Americanisation, wasn't up to scratch. The Ford English School would see to it that you were. Good cut! No-shows were automatically fired. Before or after their shifts, the workers sat in rows, learning their words by rote. And the first the thing they all recited was, of course, "I am an American." There's nothing more American than baseball, the national game. So, where else would Henry Ford choose for the graduation of his students from the English School except a baseball park? Come the great day, the students and their families all gathered before a platform specially arranged for the occasion. Down below the platform was a reconstructed melting pot, made of cardboard, papier-mache and pasteboard. The students all filed along the platform, received their degrees, and then down they went into the melting pot, to emerge real Americans, waving their little Stars and Stripes.

It was a perfect American day for a perfect ceremony of Americanisation. Crushing the foreignness out of immigrants wasn't the only way of dealing with the mass immigration of the early 20th century. A few pioneers took a more enlightened approach towards what an American could be. Grace Abbott, a former high-school teacher from Nebraska, was one of the great campaigners for immigrant rights. She was as brilliant as they come, but she was no remote intellectual. Abbott had lived among the immigrants on the streets of Chicago, where she was a social worker. And she knew where the young immigrants, especially thousands of girls who came raw to the city, were most vulnerable, the train station. Here they were easy prey for men who coaxed them to sweatshops or saloons. So Grace Abbott's Immigrant Protective League set up reception centres, staffed by women who spoke their languages, to offer them the priceless gifts of protection and advice. She wrote of her experiences in her book, The Immigrant And The Community, America's first sympathetic account of immigrant culture. For me, Grace Abbott is one of the great, unsung heroines of modern American history. Because, at a time when almost everybody was complaining that immigrant cultures adulterated the purity of American life, she actually thought they enriched it. To honour and cherish where you came from, Abbott believed, was not to compromise or betray your American loyalty, but to strengthen it. So, instead of being embarrassed by America's differences and its diversity, she thought that was exactly America's unique glory. While many Americans demanded that the children of immigrants forget their parents' language, Grace wanted them to hold on to it and everything else about their culture. For in that way, America would become a true world nation, a multi-ethnic miracle. When Abbott asks Crevecoeur's question, What is an American?

Her answer is shockingly, movingly modern. "We're many nationalities,ˇ± she wrote, scattered over a continent." "We should not be ashamed of this but recognise the opportunity this brings. If all the races on Earth" can live together in America, "and if we can respect the differences, then, we shall meet" the American opportunity." There have been times, even recently, when that respect has been put in jeopardy. Post 9/11 America was just such a time. Many questioned the patriotism of the country's two and half million Muslims, and even their right to call themselves American. Well, obviously, since 9/11, America has got a warped impression of Arab Americans and Muslims in particular. I was in a department store when it happened. I was watching it on TV, and I said, Please God, don't let it be Muslims. Yet, Chuck Alawan, whose parents settled in, of all places, Henry Ford's Detroit, is stubbornly optimistic. He says, post 9/11 paranoia was the exception in his life in America. I, frankly, have been raised in a pretty good atmosphere. I never felt a burden. It...

I tell people that I am as American as apple pie. No one here considers themselves less American just because of where they're from and how they pray. So, I wonder what Chuck thinks the selection of someone with Barack Obama's background says about America. The man is now, for the first time in history, a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, and he has all these "complications." He's African-American, his father was a Muslim, he's got a Muslim name, he's got a white mother, you know, and on and on. And these are the kind of complications that most Americans are just now dealing with. And the future years are going to ease up on this because, you know, I guess I call it the colouring of America. America today is probably 40 percent ethnic. Chinese, Japanese, Arab, African-American, I mean, it's no longer the Mayflower white majority. It's fast becoming coloured in the sense of this mosaic of people. Well, this is changing the politics of America. It's changing the thinking of Americans. With profound gratitude and great humility, I accept your nomination... Seeing Barack Obama accept the nomination of the Democratic Party, I knew that, whatever the result of this election, an historic threshold had been crossed. Here's someone who just a few years ago could never have been a candidate for the most powerful office in America. Yet, here he was, a man with roots in the wheat fields of Kansas, and the villages of Kenya who could end up in the White House next January. Now that, I think, would have made Crevecoeur's heart jump with joy. But, then, I would think that. You see, I'm an American immigrant myself. And, without starry eyes, I do believe in the American future.

Read more informations for American Religion