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Notes -
This is reductive. We also became "a nation of immigrants" at the time when the "settler" model became technologically outmoded. The primary mechanism of "settlement" in the U.S. was claiming or disbursement of previously un-used land for use in agriculture, with the development of secondary industries in local and regional towns/small cities following after. Nineteeenth century groups who gravitated towards wage labor in established commercial centers - the Polish in Chicago; Italians and Jews in NYC; Irish in Boston; even the Germans in St. Louis - all experienced significant cultural and political pushback as undesirable.
When the phrase "nation of immigrants" shows up, American agriculture had forcefully departed from the "small family farm" model(pdf warning). The number of farms in the U.S. shrank from a peak of appx. 7 million in the 1930s, to below 2 million by 1970, at the same time the size of the average farm doubled. Farming became industrial, capital-intensive (particularly on marginal land), and subjected to significant regulation. Such jobs as poor migrants might have in agriculture now was primarily low-paying, prestige-less seasonal piece-work. Meanwhile, industrial wages were at their historical apex, and industrial centers were drawing huge numbers of people from the countryside - between 1920 and 1960 the U.S. went from about 50-50 urban/rural, to 70-30.
In 1960, "migration" was by far economically superior to "settlement," the folkways of those settlers were dying, and the descendants of those settlers, having been thoroughly "Americanized," were draining into the great cities and looking for work alongside "immigrants." These trends have only increased over time, to the point that it it takes revisionist scholarship in obscure academic social theory nowadays to even recover the difference between urban migration and rural settlement/development.
So while the "nation of immigrants" line was certainly developed and deployed as a political tool, it also corresponded to an underlying shift in economics, demographics, and technological process which was erasing "settler" as a distinctive category from "immigrant" in the first place. It's not some conspiracy; someone was going to develop and deploy the concept one way or another.
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