America: a Nation of Settlers

A group of congressional Republicans have joined Democrats in an effort to push through an amnesty bill by performing two cheap tricks: repeat the tired trope that we’re a "nation of immigrants" and redefine "amnesty" as "dignity."...

The key part of the bill is an "earned opportunity for long-term immigrants to stay here and work." How long-term? Five years. That means people who illegally snuck across our border as recently as 2020 would be allowed to remain in the United States forever - without any of the obligations and responsibilities that come with full citizenship. That’s amnesty...

... our economy is not a possession of the world, it belongs to the American people. Foreign access to it, to the extent we allow it at all, should first and foremost serve the interests of the American people, not a contingent of foreigners who managed to get into our country and remain here for at least seven years without getting caught...

... we tried this one-time amnesty gambit before, in President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 immigration reform that gave amnesty to nearly three million illegals in exchange for vague promises about border security, which of course never materialized...

We’re not a nation of immigrants, we’re a nation of settlers. The people who founded America came to settle it... They were not immigrating to an established nation, they were forging a nation out of a vast, largely unpopulated wilderness... Indeed the phrase itself, "nation of immigrants," is nonsense. Immigrants by definition don’t create a nation, they become part of an established nation by assimilating into it...