Of course, in the strictest sense this is perfectly true. If you go far enough back then everyone's ancestors arrived here at some point. That isn't really what people mean when they use the term in common parlance though. What "descendant of immigrants" means generally is someone whose immediate ancestors arrived here relatively recently ..and relative is the key word.
We can't strictly define what recently means. It's always going to be relative. Some people's ancestors have been here for "a long time," but naturally, something can only be long relative to something else. Four hundred years might be long in comparison to forty years, but likewise it's short compared to four thousand. (The Huguenots can be both ancient and recent depending upon who's framing the argument.)
The left tend to be quite disingenuous on the topic. When they make the technical argument that, "Everyone is a descendant of immigrants," they're trying to discredit the fact that there's been a long (again, relatively long) continuous chain of people living here going back centuries. They understand perfectly well what "descendant of immigrants" means in a general sense - the term would be utterly pointless if it just meant everyone - but they feign that they don't. They falsely appeal to the technical definition of words, ignoring the spirit of the words and their context.
(Think the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law, and lawyers trying to catch people out on technical infringements.)
However, by the same token, people on the right can be just as disingenuous. Insisting on the reality of some pure-in-blood English nation, when they know in their hearts that even settled peoples have a medley of ancestors, and a peppering of immigration.
So, how would I define "descendant of immigrants" ?
I kind of have my own way of looking at things. Personally, I like to root things in the real, lived world. So, for me, it's all about intergenerational experience.
Most humans tend to have a limited knowledge of their personal antecedents. You have direct experience of your parents. You also tend to have direct experience of your grandparents. If you're lucky you might also have known your great-grandparents first-hand. Very few people get to meet their great-great-grandparents however.
Of course, as you live alongside your parents and grandparents you may hear stories - second-hand - of older relatives you never got the chance to meet, which adds to your knowing of them, but that tends to be the extent of it.
Consequently, if you ask a random person in the street to name their great-grandparents most will struggle. This is perfectly natural, as we live in the here and now, and without first or second-hand experience we simply won't know this stuff without appealing to written records of some sort.
So, after about three generations there's a natural dislocation, where our personal history disappears into a general fog of culture. Therefore, I would say that after about three generations of living in one place you can discard the "descendant of immigrants" tag.
(As an aside try to imagine how much this would've been the case before written records. For instance, Jewish people have one of the oldest written records. The biblical genealogies may sound a bit dry and boring to the modern ear - so-and-so was the son of so-and-so, this person begat that person. However, imagine you live in a tribe where you only have first (and perhaps second-hand) knowledge of your personal ancestors, then someone comes along who can reel off a list of their ancestors going back centuries. It would be quite impressive.)
My Recent Ancestors
Sadly, my family history is a little too boring to provide a good example, but it might serve for one final illustration. As far as I know everyone on my family tree is British, however within that there is Scottish as well as English, so we can pretend Scotland is a truly foreign country for the sake of argument.
My grandmother was Scottish (my other three grandparents English). She died when I was about seven years old. So for that first seven years of my life she was a direct influence on me - I heard her Scottish accent; was exposed to her Scottish cultural mores. It no doubt had some effect on me. Likewise her Scottish-ness will have left an even bigger imprint on my mother, who lived for forty odd years in her presence - and that, in turn, through my mother, will have influenced me somewhat too.
On top of this I have the countless stories about Scotland, and about Scottish relatives, regaled to me by my mother.
So, even though I've never lived in Scotland I'm a bit Scottish through this direct experience. How much is impossible to say, but it's enough to register as something significant.
However, if all four of my grandparents were English born, and instead, it was one of my great-grandparents that was Scottish born, this influence would've been massively diluted. I'd have never known a Scottish born relative first-hand, and the drips of family lore about Scotland would be third-hand, not second - if I even received them.
If we pushed this Scottish born ancestor back a further generation still, I might not have even been aware of the Scottish ancestry at all. I'd have just assumed that I was wholly English.
Of course, things would be quite different if a multitude of my recent ancestors were Scottish, and not just one. Plus, things would be much more pronounced if these Scottish people had a language, religion and culture that was significantly different to that of the English people they'd came to live amongst. Still though, as far as place is concerned, once you get removed a few generations from the people that had first-hand experience of living somewhere else you're gonna be fairly rooted.
As ever, it's the integration of different cultures that's the tricky problem. Not so much the rooting of people to the geography.
(As a final aside, though it's good to pass down written history, it can also be a huge barrier to integration. Once cultural values get written down - as religious texts, for example - it becomes easier for them to be retained and passed down - as with the genealogies. It makes that culture more rigid and less flexible, so when it comes into contact with other living cultures it's harder to blend or assimilate. So historical knowledge can be a burden to people, as well as an advantage.)
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