Do you agree that in the US, everyone but Native Americans is either an illegal immigrant, or descended from one?

[Anonymous]

The first European settlers (like the Pilgrims and Spanish conquistadors) didn’t “immigrate” in the legal sense — they colonized. That involved conquest, displacement of native peoples, and no consent from the original inhabitants. Colonization is arguably worse, but its all bad.

[WindAtMyBack]

I don't agree for multiple reasons. I especially don't agree with the implication. It's a non-argument.

The vast majority of people in the US are here legally.

The implication is that if the Europeans were immigrants, then all other immigrants should be allowed. But that is comparing apples to oranges. The present day US and Canada were very sparsely populated before the Europeans came. Nobody knows just how many people there were, but it was probably less than 1% of the current population.

The country today is way over-populated. It's saturated. Almost all of the population increase is due to immigration. That's been true for several decades. What is enough? 500 million? A billion?

If we had open borders like some people want, we'd probably have at least 20 million immigrants the first year. I could see it being considerably more than that. Where are you going to put all those people? We can't even keep up with the current immigration rate.

The people who want more immigrants better not complain about the high cost of housing. The cost of housing is directly affected by the vacancy rate. The vacancy rate is extremely low, which puts a lot of upward pressure on housing costs.

How much land and forests are being cleared to make room for all these people? How much infrastructure is needed? How many resources are used? How much pollution is caused? How much farm land is needed to feed the people?

Don't complain about high health care costs either. We have a severe shortage of hospitals, doctors and other health care professionals. That is only going to get worse, even if the population was static. Even if it started right now (which it won't), it would probably take 15-20 years to build new medical schools and hospitals, and get the doctors through the pipeline. It's a HUGE problem.

Over population affects a whole lot of things in a negative way. None of those things were an issue when the Europeans first came to the US.

Also, keep in mind that the "natives" are immigrants also. For that matter, virtually everyone in the world are immigrants. But there comes a time when the population gets so large that you have to say enough is enough. It's not the same as in the past because it CAN'T be the same as in the past.

People making this argument to justify continued immigration are making a non-argument. It doesn't carry any weight whatsoever.

[Asker]

You did not answer the question. Want to try again?

[WindAtMyBack]

I answered the question in the first sentence. You asked if we agree and I said no.

[RavVid]

The question doesn't make sense for any immigrant nation as the original people didn't have laws on immigration.

Until 1776, an English person wan't immigrating to go to America because he was equally a subject of the crown in either place. It was more like moving to another city or state.

If you were a subject of the crown, then you were a citizen in all his domains.

[Asker]

A law or boundary does not have to be written down to be a law. The fact that Native Americans fought long and vigorously against colonizers is sufficient proof of the existence of a belief in ownership and thus a boundary. In some societies, law is based on custom or religious traditions, which may not be written but are still accepted as legally binding.

[purplepoppy]

People are missing the point on this. There may have not been any immigration laws but that doesn't mean forceful colonisation was right.

Mass immigration, often violent in Europe happened in a different era when ethics were different, the arival of the saxons and vikings in England, the invasion of France by Britons as Rome fell. Similar story across Europe but it was a different time by simple minded people. The invasion of America wasn't that long ago, it was by a relatively modern Christian civilisation not some vikings looking to please Thor.

[Anonymous]

Yes what happened to the native Americans was wrong and I do agree they are the rightful owners of the American land but I am in no way responsible for what happened to them 100 plus years ago because I wasn’t born

[Asker]

Nobody suggested that anyone was personally responsible.

[OlderAndWiser]

What immigration laws existed that the Pilgrims violated?

[Asker]

We can't know, but the reactions of the indigenous inhabitants indicate that they were very displeased at the theft of their land and other crimes.

[OlderAndWiser]

And the people who were already here stole land from each other. Are you judging actions taken in the 1600's by 2025 standards?

[Asker]

What specific standards did you have in mind? Theft and violence are what they are.

[OlderAndWiser]

Yes, you are judging their behavior by your standards. You need not admit it if that makes you uncomfortable, but that is what you are doing.

[Asker]

Again: What standards are you referring to, exactly?

[OlderAndWiser]

Standard for declaring who owns property when there are no deeds, no titles, no fences, and the owners move frequently.

[Dargil]

But there was no known legislation outlawing western Europeans.

[Asker]

@olderandwiser, I guess all those colonists who got into fights with the indigents should have referenced those things. Probably would have saved a lot of bloodshed.

[Zylos]

I do, but there comes a point where it gets ridiculous. It's so long ago now.

I am all for enforcing the rules, but there are ways to do that where you aren't a petty piece of shit kidnapping people who have lived in America for most or all of their lives and throwing them in camps or deporting them to gulags or war zones.

This just feels like performative cruelty.

[lightbulb27]

it's a good point, yes, "we" took over and made it something more than a bunch of tribes... made it a nation... by kicking out the natives whom were savigages, unlike the cultured religious people... that burned women at the stake.

But most everyone in Normandy is an illegal immigrant, including the french. It was taken over by Germanic scandanavians centuries ago. they should all leave and return it to the rightful peasant owners.

[Anonymous]

The areas the English settled in the Americas weren't conquest it was colonisation and the natives largely welcomed them. Conquest came later. Remember in the early days there just wasn't and couldn't be enough European settlers for conquest. Take new England for instance, the English thought that the land had been set aside for them in an uncommon way by God because the entire state with its fertile lands was empty of natives. What had actually happened was the natives in new England had come into contact with 10 or 15 years b4 French and spainsh traders and explorers for the first time and were basically given every old world disease all at once killing most of them off and causing the rest to flee west.

The native Americans experience shows what happens when unchecked immigration is allowed.

[Asker]

You think by renaming a few things you can change the meaning of what happened? How do you know they were welcome? Were you there when that happened? You're just making up stories to please your own bias.

[Opinion Owner]

They traded with them. Originally as well columbus and the later conquistadors were welcomed which is why it was so shitty what they later did. Colonisation is a hard pill for their descendants in Mexico to swallow.

[Asker]

You don't know what they really did because you weren't there to see it. You were relying on history books that may or may not be accurate. One thing we know for sure is that a lot of fighting occurred between native Americans and colonizers.

[Asker]

I can contend that the reason for that fighting had a lot to do with the fact that the colonizers were taking over land and resources that belonged to the native Americans. There may have been other reasons as well that I'm not aware of, but that seems like an obvious reason. I know that in the western part of the United States where I live when the colonizers begin putting up fences on what had otherwise been open land that provoked a lot of fighting lasting up until the late 1800s. That situation is well documented in history.

[Opinion Owner]

There were certainly skirmishes between the early settlers and natives but it wasn't on the scale of the constant tribal wars the natives had amongst themselves. Colonisers did put up basic fencing for their livestock and to keep animals out of their fields as well as to defend their settlements but this was nothing new to the native Americans who also did the same in the east. Its only in the western plains that the natives were nomadic following the buffalo.
In the 1800s the devil's fencing or barbwire which was put up in the plains in the west changed a lot of things as did the railways but by that time Europeans had been in the Americas for 400 years.

[Asker]

You can minimize thisall you like but I have ancestors who were involved in it, and it was far from "skirmishes" or "basic fencing". Let me put up some "basic fencing" on your land and we will see how you react, ok?

You were not there for any of this, so anything you say about it is speculation.

The colonizers might have been there for a long time but that does NOT make it right. It was not their land, and still isn't.

[Opinion Owner]

Wasn't their land. There were huge tracks of land they had not settled and if they had choosen could have wiped the orginial colonies out but they were happy to trade for European goods. Fencing off large fields of land was not anymore possible for European settlers than it was for native American farmers and fencing in those days was easily removed, it would be no hindrance to them.

Agreements were made between settlers and natives and they were welcomed.

[Asker]

I am not going to waste my time arguing with you. You write as if you were there and witnessed all this, and all you are really doing is guessing and trying to pass your speculations off as facts. That is arrogant and intellectually dishonest.

[Opinion Owner]

Its just history. When Europeans arrived the natives just treated them as another tribe or tribes. More than willing to trade with them for iron, horses and firearms. Anything that would give them an advantage over other neighboring tribes. For instance the Sioux claim ownership of the black hills and that the white man stole it from them but they stole the land from the Arapaho who stole it from the kiowa who stole it from the crow, who stole it from the cheyene who stole it from the Arikara. They actually found a child from the clovis culture and dna tests show the child was linked closer to south American natives than north American natives.

[Asker]

More unsupported bullshit. History is written by the winners. That would be the colonizers in this case.

[Opinion Owner]

You discount it because it doesn't validate what you want to be true.

[jahaims]

You either don't understand the law or what illegal means. Everyone stole the the land they are on. Native Americans were in constant battle with each other over resources just like every other place on earth.

[Asker]

How do you know that? Were you living then?

[contentious]

If you are born in America, then you are Native American. If you were related to a precolonial tribe, you'd claim heritage to that tribe/nation. That's why there are federally recognized tribes like the Apache or The Muscogee (Creek) Nation. People who have those blood lines know who they are, they don't just call themselves Native American, because everyone that is born here is a native.

[Asker]

This is just an issue of cement. It's that you are distorted for your own goals here. The term native American refers to native American Indians. Not to people born in the US necessarily.

[Asker]

Sorry, that should read an issue of semantics not cement. But you get the idea.

[Asker]

Do your self-serving defective semantic analysis elsewhere. This is NOT what this question is about, and your quibbling over the meaning of terms is ridiculous.

[Asker]

Get off this question.

[Dargil]

Because...

[beefcakebradybatson]

The Original Americans are First Peoples, to whom I'm related. (At least, for a year as a lad, my next-door neighbours were my Status Indian cousins.)

[exitseven]

nope, we have legal citizens who were either born here or are naturalized citizens. There are also many legal immigrants.

[Twalli]

There weren't any laws to stop them. In order to be an illegal you have to break a law. There weren't any.

[Anonymous]

Well yeah, I think immigration as a concept was not a thing until within the past 300ish years. At least not how we see it today.

[Anonymous]

No country, no government, no immigration laws... so no.

[Asker]

Enough sense of ownership to put up a long fight over the land, so yes.

[Opinion Owner]

I'm sure the people they took it from fought for it too.

[Asker]

That is what I just said.

[Opinion Owner]

I'm talking about the other tribes the natives took it from.

[Asker]

Probably so.

[Asker]

That doesn't change anything.

[Opinion Owner]

It means that if they just took it from someone else, it wasn't theirs either. And if it was, then it belongs to the last people that successfully took it. These rules apply to all or none. Can't have it both ways.

[beefcakebradybatson]

We blacks are kidnap victims.

[DrPepper12]

No. Enslaved people were neither.

[Asker]

you miss the point.

[RageBabe]

No, I disagree.

[blackeagle007]

How’s Native American illegal immigrant?

[Asker]

Read the entire question please.

[blackeagle007]

You seem like a female

[Asker]

You seem like someone who doesn't read.

[Dargil]

Nope.