Colin Woodard is an American journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist,  known for his books American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, the New York Times bestseller  The Republic of Pirates, for Lobster Coast, a cultural and environmental history of coastal Maine, as well as three others. Woodard is Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University, a project focused on counteracting the authoritarian threat to American democracy and the centrifugal forces threatening the U.S. federation’s stability. 

Using the American Nations model Woodard demonstrates how unevenly foreign immigration has been spread and how it’s changed over the course of the past 125 years.

The outgrowths of those divergent historical experiences and resulting cultural legacies help explain the current regional attitudes and divides over immigration policy. He shows how Americans, by and large, continue to see the country as a nation of immigrants and reject radical anti-immigrant policies, just as they oppose total abortion bans and support tightening gun regulations. But as with these other issues, in our federated and triple-branched system, public support alone is no guarantee of the political outcome.