In the American Enlightenment era, how is the immigrant narrative in American literature used to create and transform the American identity?

The American Enlightenment was a period of great ideological ferment in which the ideals, ideologies, and innovations of European Enlightenment thought intersected with political activism and nation building. What made this so distinctive was that rather than focusing on political thought as a matter of historical analysis, the American Revolution was focused on creating an ideal form of government for a new nation. Unlike the subsequent French Revolution, however, it had no previous national traditions or ethnic concept of the "American people" on which to build. J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur in 1782 seminally asked, "Who is this new man, this American?" The thinkers of the American Enlightenment, in addition to creating a political system for the United States, also needed to create a vision of the American people to which that system would apply.
Rather than take as a starting point the Native American cultures who had been successfully living in the region for millennia and practiced what many people now see as innovative models of governance that offer alternatives to much of the agonistic style of European democracy, the thinkers of the American Enlightenment took as a starting point the notion of forging a new nation of immigrants into a unique "American identity."
In a sense, all American literature (except Native American) is immigrant literature, in which Europe is seen as a past and a part of history, and the Unites States as a future, endlessly reinventing itself and what it means to be American. Even in writers such as Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, we see this notion of the United States as temporally inflected. This is even more the case in immigrant literature, in which a key issue is abandoning a country of the past not only to settle in America, but to become American. In some cases, this leads to a fusion of national and economic opportunity, in which the American ideal is one in which any person, no matter how poor or from what part of the world, can become an "American" and achieve the "American Dream," although often reality fails to live up to such ideals.
American identity can be viewed as one which offers freedom and religious choicet—that is, freedom from the older and artificial conventions of England. We see this in such works as Hope Leslie, or, Early Times in the Massachusetts by Catharine Maria Sedgwick. In Irish immigrant stories, there is more ambivalence, with the Irish leaving their homes reluctantly and Irish Catholics, especially, often experiencing various forms of ethnic and religious discrimination. In this case, we see a contrast between the Enlightenment ideals and the actual reality of immigrant life. Willa Cather's O Pioneers! also illustrates the tension between the American and Enlightenment ideals of self-fashioning and opportunity created by hard work, with a distinct hierarchy of immigrants and the formation of an American identity founded not as much in those abstract ideals as in a generic amalgamation of white, Northern European Protestant traditions.
http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/xcritsource/multicult/IrishAmLitEarlyDonohoe.htm

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2477&context=greatplainsquarterly