NYT interviews Susan Martin about her new book on immigration

So deeply has the phrase “a nation of immigrants” seeped into the American psyche that millions of people reflexively use it while few know who coined the phrase. (It was Senator John F. Kennedy, in a 1958 book by that name.)

Susan F. Martin, a historian at Georgetown University, embraces the term even as she warns that it hides more than it reveals. Her book — titled, yes, “A Nation of Immigrants” — argues that the United States historically has favored immigration more consistently than it has immigrants.

Three competing models evolved in the original colonies, she writes, each with a different vision of what purposes newcomers would serve. Elements of each have persisted since.

Virginia sought workers but found them in slaves.

Massachusetts sought believers but punished dissent.

Pennsylvania sought citizens, and built them from foreign stock (despite gripes from residents as cosmopolitan as Benjamin Franklin).

Each model was pro-immigration, Ms. Martin argues, but not necessarily pro-immigrant.

“They had very different ideas about what would happen after the immigrant entered the country,” she said in an interview.