Soon, a new year will be upon us. As an American history geek, I know I’ll be spending much of 2025 thinking about 2026 — specifically, the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding. A quarter-millennium seems like a good point to stop, look around, and assess.

I wonder what our Founding Fathers would think of our progress?

If the brilliant, and cantankerous, John Adams was resurrected, and happened upon a copy of The Baltimore Sun, I think he would be surprised, then alarmed, and then proud to learn that we elected a Black man to be president — twice. The election of Donald Trump would probably inspire some disappointment, given all that Adams risked to help establish this nation. But, I think the greatest shock of all would probably be the level of immigration.

President John Adams was a supporter of the 1798 Naturalization Act, a law that more than doubled the number of years an immigrant needed to wait before applying for U.S. citizenship. Adams and his contemporaries believed a longer gestation period gave immigrants more time to appreciate what it means to be American. One can argue a similar point today.

Immigration is one of the ways America renews itself. The injection of new blood and cultures helps to keep us young and vital — literally. But, since the 1970s, the United States has experienced the largest surge of immigration in its history, mostly from India and Latin America. Eight million people have arrived since the beginning of the Biden administration alone. According to recent estimates, one out of every 10 people in the United States today was born somewhere else. That means millions of people in this country have no connection to any of the defining events of the nation’s past, even recent events, like the Civil Rights Movement.

This is important because the children of that wave are now adults and moving into positions of power. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, Donald Trump’s appointees to the new Department of Government Efficiency, are an immigrant, and the child of immigrants, respectively.

During the presidential campaign, I would listen to Ramaswamy’s stump speech about the sacrifices and principles of our nation’s founders and cringe. I thought to myself, how can Ramaswamy have anything but an academic understanding of the sacrifices of the founders of this nation? His ancestors arrived long after the historical events we point to as touchstones of our “Americanness”: the Civil Rights Movement, the Civil War and the American Revolution. For many of us, these events aren’t academic, they’re visceral.

The American Revolution, for example, was a traumatic experience that had no guarantee of success. It was a crap shoot. Everyone who openly supported the revolution was signing their own death warrant. The fact that we won at all, was luck. We could very easily have lost that war, and all the people we revere today — Washington, Adams, Jefferson — would be hanged. Scientists speak about how trauma can be passed down through generations. If that is true, everyone today who is a descendant of the people who lived in those times bears the scars of that conflict.

Consider the Civil War, a struggle that almost tore this nation apart. To this day, it is the bloodiest, deadliest war Americans have ever fought. It decimated our Southern states — which have only in recent decades fully recovered. And, there are places in the South today where you can still feel the effects of that war — where people still have yet to dig themselves out of the hole that conflict created.

And, the Civil Rights Movement — which was only 60 years ago — was, in many ways, a consequence of unresolved issues of the Civil War. In the 1960s, people of every shade and background threw themselves into the streets and demanded that leaders deliver on unfulfilled promises made a century before. That movement colored everything that followed. Sadly, there are Americans walking the streets today with no knowledge of the sacrifices that were made to secure the freedoms they take for granted.

Our Founding Fathers were not infallible. As they established this country, they made many mistakes along the way. For centuries, the people (and the descendants of the people) who made those mistakes have been trying to correct them. That’s what the Civil War was about, and the Civil Rights Movement. The current debates around affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion are examples of that effort. Many Americans have a visceral connection to these issues because of their historical connection to underlying events. For Black Americans in particular, the physical consequences of those events are etched on our DNA and flow through our veins.

In the run-up to our 250th anniversary, there will be a lot of talk about unresolved issues, unanswered questions, and whether we’ve lived up to the ideals set by our founders. For the first time in our history, a significant portion of our population will have no blood, or experiential, connection to the key historical events that define us. Yet, many of those same people will be in positions to influence the decisions on these questions.

The price of American citizenship is the burden of stewardship — stewardship of this nation’s conscience, to be exact. Recent immigrants, and their children, have been spared the weight of that burden, but they’ve enjoyed the benefits. In the coming year, as we all debate important questions about this nation’s past and future, all of us, including our newest Americans, need to acknowledge the contributions of those who came before and honor their sacrifices.

K. Ward Cummings is an essayist and social critic. He lives in Baltimore.