Out of the Woods

 

                    Undocumented

 

 

    

In 1620 110 Pilgrims left Europe for the New World. Their first winter was disastrous. In Spring 1621 no more than 50 of the original immigrants survived. These too might well have died had it not been for two Native Americans, Samoset and Squanto, who assisted the English Pilgrims to adjust to the new country, its climate and soils. The native inhabitants were not Christians, they were not committed by their religion to help strangers in distress. Nevertheless they welcomed immigrants and eased their transition.

Quite a contrast with today's Americans who profess Christianity and a commitment to helping their neighbors!

This contrast challenges us to think more carefully about the plight of the people whom we call "illegal" or "undocumented." European immigrants who arrived on American soil until about 1890 had no papers. They were not documented or undocumented. They simply arrived, except for the African-Americans who were imported against their will and some whites who also came involuntarily--convicts or victims of kidnaps shipped to America to work. But the preponderance of whites chose to immigrate and did so without any bureaucratic permission.

Seven of the 39 men who signed the Constitution were immigrants. In fact, two of the three men most associated with its passage, Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson, were foreign-born. Hamilton was one of three men who wrote the Federalist Papers explaining and urging ratification of the Constitution. Hamilton had no citizenship or immigration papers. By today's standards he was "undocumented." By the mean-spirited standards dominating politics today, the 18th century equivalent of Homeland Security should have arrested these Founders of our country and sent them back to where they came from.

Persecution of immigrants is justified, in the minds of many, because after all this land is our land and we have every right to regulate who enters and who lives here and who will be excluded. The 50 states are ours and we may make laws to regulate who comes in and who stays.

Yes, but what makes it our land?

When the Pilgrims made landfall the land belonged to a variety of smaller and larger Native American tribes who lived, farmed, and perpetuated themselves and their cultures in these different places. How did it become our property. Yes, the Dutch bought Manhattan--or so we are told. But Native Americans did not have a concept of private property in land. Land was sacred. One could no buy or sell it. People used the land and it was against customs to try to take land where someone else had planted a garden or erected a dwelling. The so-called "sale" of Manhattan was most likely obtaining permission for hunting and farming the land in Manhattan. No white immigrant ever bought any American lands from its native inhabitants.

Yes we did buy Louisiana from France and Alaska from Russia. (How did France and Russia come to be able to sell land in the Americas?) But the land of the 50 states "belongs" to us because we took it by force in a long series of Indian wars. We took Texas, California and the Southwest --where keeping out the "undocumented" is a particularly incendiary issue--from Mexico in the Mexican American War in 1848. The ancestors of some of the "undocumented" lived in the states which now wants to exclude them.

We are not legitimate inhabitants of this land.

Many of the "undocumented" immigrants from Mexico and farther south are what they call "mestizos." Their ancestors include many indigenous persons--inhabitants of this hemisphere for thousands of years--and Spanish colonizers. They are likely to have a better claim to living in South and North America than the descendants of White Europeans by virtue of their ancestors who have cultivated this land for many centuries, who lived here long before Christopher Columbus and others ravaged the hemisphere and its inhabitants.

The white settlers, and their descendants, have no right to keep out the descendants of peoples who have lived here for many centuries. They stole the lands we now inhabit. But robbery cannot yield a legitimate property title. If someone steals your car, is it now his?

We have an obligation to welcome migrants from South of our border and to ask them to allow us to share this land of theirs.