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Heritage American is a designation that became popular in American national conservatism and the MAGA movement in 2025. Definitions vary, but it generally encompasses "present-day Americans who trace their ancestral roots to the colonial period, or shortly thereafter".
It is mainly used to identify people descending from Anglo-Protestant and Scotch-Irish white settlers who lived in the original colonies and later moved west to settle the American frontier. Some definitions include Native Americans and descendants of enslaved people. Proponents of the heritage American identity have opposed what they call "propositional nationalism" (referring to civic nationalism) as having emerged as a result of immigration changes brought about by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 that abolished the US immigration system's usage of national origin quotas. Proponents of heritage American identity claim that the Hart-Celler Act lead to a fundamental alteration of American citizenship to a propositional nationalism which they would like to reverse.
The term has been criticized as a euphemism for white Americans with New York Times writer Ezekiel Kkweku claiming that the term has been used "to launder white nationalism with facially neutral language". C. Jay Engel contests the association of it with white Americans in general because he claims it cannot be reduced down to racial or ethnic categories noting that today a second generation Swedish American would be a white American but would not be a heritage American.
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