historian said:
FLBear5630 said:
Realitybites said:
Semantics? Not all. Words have meaning.
Settler: as in pioneer, a person who settles in a new region
Immigrant: someone who leaves one country to live in another.
Illegal alien: a foreign person who lives in a country without having official permission to live there
What percent of the "Settlers" were born outside of the US? You are mixing concepts and taking only the positive from each.
For years, the US had basically no "immigration" laws, so people flowed over the borders daily. This illegal alien concept is a modern concept and less than 100 years old. Want to play word games, OK. If it is as you say a Nation of Settlers, the US was looted from indigenous people through a pattern of force and genocide. Your model has no place for incorporating people into the US, but subjugating them and the concept of illegal alien came about after the Imperial US and other Western Nations stopped colonizing and investing is those areas. Never took you for a liberal
I prefer that the US IS a Nation of immigrants and that there is a place for everyone in that society. But, you go with the Imperial Settler model.
That's mainly because modern immigration laws are modern. We didn't have many such laws for the first 100+ years of our history because we had a small population but lots of land. We wanted more people coming. Also, the people who were coming were mostly the same as the people already here so there was no cultural disruption. Today both of those aspects are flipped: we have a large population without vast quantities of unsettled land (actually we still have lots of land but the greenies don't want it developed) and the people coming now are radically different with no plans to assimilate. Instead they expect us to conform to their practices and ideas. It is more properly described as an invasion.
Exactly. But, they still came form somewhere else.
As for assimilate? How many decades did it take for the Italians in NY, Germans in PA, Chinese in CA, Cubans in FL to assimilate? An argument can be made that they haven't yet, it is happening but very slowly. Go to Motte Street in Little Italy in NY it is down to a block or so. Go to Chinatown in NY of SF, still highly non-assimilated and they came in the 1800's. Go Lancaster, PA and tell me how well they assimilated.
This is not a new problem, it is a migration problem. To say the early immigrants, when most of our families came, were Settlers and those today are illegal immigrants does not resonate.