by Joe Miller
Earlier this month, pop star Billie Eilish made waves at the Grammy Awards. While accepting the award for song of the year, Eilish claimed that “no one is illegal on stolen land.”
Full disclosure: my personal views on immigration are a lot closer to Eilish’s than they are to the Trump administration’s. America is built on the backs of other countries’ “tired and poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” That was true when our largest sources of immigrants were Ireland and Germany and it’s just as true of immigrants from Mexico and India.
And yet, while I find our current treatment of immigrant communities appalling, I also think that “no one is illegal on stolen land” is a crazy thing to say.
This is not meant as a particular knock on Eilish, who is, after all, a 24-year-old pop star. I am thankful every day that social media wasn’t around to capture all the dumb things that I said at that age.
Unfortunately, the notion that America is stolen land is prevalent across left-leaning spaces.
A couple of weeks ago, for example, my wife and I attended a play in Washington, DC. The performance began with what progressive groups call a land acknowledgement. This particular acknowledgement consisted of a statement that the performance would take place on land that had been under the stewardship of the Nacotchtank.
For those of you not familiar with colonial native tribes, the Nacotchtank were a branch of Algonquian-speaking people who resided in what is now the DC area when Europeans first arrived.
The “when Europeans first arrived” part is important here.
There’s archeological evidence that humans have lived in the Potomac region for about 4,000 years. But those earliest humans weren’t Nacotchtank. Algonquin-speaking humans originated in what is now Quebec, and various Algonquin offshoots made their way down the eastern seaboard, conquering other people as they went.
Modern media often depicts indigenous Americans as peaceful, driven to war only thanks to the arrival of European settlers.
Reality is much different.
Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor of archeology at the University of Illinois in Chicago, argues that 87% of indigenous people in the Americas engaged in wars against their neighbors at least once per year.
That’s not particularly unique to the Americas. Keeley found across the globe, 90-95% of people who lived in pre-state societies (that is, those living in situations where the tribe or the village was the largest organized unit) engaged in war.
Across both pre-and recorded history, humans have moved to new places and taken land from the people who already lived there.
Pretty much everybody today lives on land that was conquered from someone who in turn conquered it from someone else who conquered it from someone else, with the cycle repeating for thousands or even tens of thousands of years.
The Mongol Empire, for example, included areas as far flung as the Koreas, Iran, Ukraine and India. The Chinese Empire once controlled large portions of modern-day Russia, Kazakhstan and Vietnam. Arabs originated in the northern part of the Arabian Peninsula but now make up majorities in most of the Middle East and Northern Africa.
Don’t get me wrong. Colonialism is bad. Wars of conquest are immoral. The formal recognition of people’s right to sovereignty within their borders is one of the great triumphs of modern international law.
But it is still important to remember that colonialism was not invented by Europeans in 1492.
The people inhabiting land when Europeans first arrived were, in almost every case, themselves the descendants of conquerors who had arrived from other lands.
Many of the academics and activists who use “stolen land” rhetoric argue that the inhabitants of what they see as “colonial states” are fundamentally illegitimate and that their modern-day residents have no inherent right to govern the lands they now inhabit.
By that reasoning, no state is or has ever been legitimate.
Maybe that’s true. Philosophical anarchism is the view that no state is morally legitimate and that therefore no one has any particular moral obligations to follow the law. My Ph.D. advisor is one of the world’s leading advocates for this view.
But even if philosophical anarchism is true, it’s not especially helpful. Places are inhabited and those inhabited places have to be governed somehow. The best solution we’ve found so far is that the people who live in a place ought to decide how it gets governed.
In practice, that means it’s perfectly legitimate to establish rules around immigration and to enforce those rules. We can and should argue about how restrictive those rules should be and how draconian our enforcement should be.
My view is that the current rules are far too restrictive and the kind of lawlessness we’re seeing from Immigration and Customs Enforcement is orders of magnitude more dangerous for the long-term health of the country than the rule-breaking they are charged with preventing.
It’s a textbook case of a cure that’s far worse than the disease.
But disagreement with the rules around immigration or the enforcement of those rules doesn’t entail that all immigration restrictions are wrong.
Our current hostility toward immigration is un-American.
But our laws around immigration are no more illegitimate than those of any other country.
