Over the years I have heard many of our nations leaders claim that we are a nation of immigrants. This is actually an inaccurate statement. We are not a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of citizens. In fact all nations exist because they are populated by citizens. It is ridiculous to act like all of the people that live here are immigrants. Ask anyone a few simple questions and you will discover that the vast majority of Americans answer the same way.
1. Were you born here?
2. Were your parents born here?
3. Were your grandparents born here?
4. Were their parents born here?
5. (if the answer to question 4 was yes keep repeating question 4)
6. (wash, rinse, repeat) etc.
Our nation was founded in 1776. That means that we have been a nation for for more than 240 years. That basically means that many Americans have been citizens of the united states going back 9 or 10 generations. Now one common argument that I often hear is that those people immigrated here from Europe somewhere, but no that is not the case. Before 1776 our ancestors did not immigrate to the United States because there was no such place. They weren't immigrants. They were colonists and explorers.
Have you ever heard the old saw "In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue"? Of course you have. So from 1492 to 1776 colonists came to this continent or to the one south of this one and began colonizing. They were not immigrants. There is a difference. An immigrant is a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country with the hope of eventually becoming a citizen of that country. There was no country here to immigrate to before 1776.
A colonist is a person who settles or founds a colony in a new land. So for a period of more than 280 years people from Europe came to the new continents forming colonies. There was no government here. There were native people living here of course, but there wasn't any nation or centralized government that claimed ownership of this land. Most of the native people were scattered primitive tribes. Those who were civilized occupied small territories so the vast majority of this continent was unoccupied, unclaimed, and unused.
That means that prior to 1776 that there were people living in the colonies who's families had already lived there for over 200 years. Not all of them had originated from England either. Settlers had come to the colonies from all over the world, but since England claimed ownership of the thirteen colonies they expected people living in them to pay taxes to their monarchy. They expected colonist to be loyal to the nation of England, a nation that many of these people had never seen and had little or no knowledge of.
Think about it. How long has your family been living in the United States? What country did your family come from? How much loyalty do you feel for whatever country your ancestors used to call home?
Putting this into perspective, for a period of time longer than our country has officially existed as a nation people came to this continent to colonize. They raised their families, made their fortunes, built their homes, and forged their own fate. They did all of this with little or no support from their nations of origin.
So along come a bunch of British soldiers, mistreating said colonists and overtaxing them. Taking into account that the British government was on the other side of the world, and was giving nothing in return for these taxes, no wonder the colonists revolted.
Moving on to 1776 the colonist win their independence and the founding fathers form the frame work that eventually becomes the form of government still in use today. Before that could happen Each of the 13 colonies took a vote. Each in turn went to their people and they decided to become citizens of this new nation that they agreed together to found. From that point forward the United States was a nation of citizens just like any other nation in the world.
There are people living here who's ancestors came to this continent over 500 years ago. That is half a millennia and 18 generations of their family living on this continent. How ridiculous is it to tell a person of that pedigree that they are an immigrant. I have to call bullshit. By definition a native is a person born in specified place. How is it that United States citizens who have been born here and can trace their lineage back for many generations cannot call themselves natives of this country? It is ludicrous on its face.
Yes, there were people here before Europeans came here to colonize. Guess what. At some point thousands of years ago their ancestors came to this continent from Asia and colonized. If you go by the logic that people who's ancestors came here from somewhere else aren't natives then no one is a native of anyplace. If you go back far enough there isn't a single civilization on this earth that didn't start because some people traveled there from some other place and formed a colony. Just saying.
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