Everyone Is Illegal On Stolen Land

If you knowingly reside on stolen land, you are just as complicit in its theft.

We’re all illegal if this is stolen land, actually. Including you.

Let’s continue the discussion on immigration by having some fun. One of the things I’ve discovered is how easy it is to refute pro-illegal immigration arguments. Like most leftist positions, they’re contradictory, disingenuous, emotionally manipulative, and inconsistent all at once.

We’ll first tackle the most oft-cited argument: No one is illegal on stolen land. This is the easiest to refute. If you knowingly reside on stolen land, you are just as complicit in its theft. The law even reflects this principle: if you take up residence on a property that you aren’t the law owner or renter of, you’re squatting and thereby illegally present. Similarly, possession of goods knowing them to have been stolen is just as criminal as the theft itself.

Anyone who thinks America is stolen land - a strongly contentious claim, but one we’ll set aside for another day - but themselves refuses to leave is participating in the theft of the land. What’s that make them? Of course, another way to look at it is that if nobody gets to lay claim to this land because it was stolen, then it’s basically a frontier completely up for grabs and anyone who wants to stay here better be ready to fight, kill, or even die to grab a piece of it for themselves or for their people. Are those terms acceptable?

Since the Los Angeles riots have started, there’s been no shortage of voices on social media pointing out how California was once a part of Mexico. Obviously, everyone knows this means even less than the fact that Algeria was once French land until the 1960s, yet this line of argumentation persists. It’s quickly become a stupid person’s idea of an educated argument, which can be quickly shot down with a simple statement: either Mexico can fight us for this land, or shut up.

Next, we’ll address claims that illegal immigration really isn’t a big deal, no different from a civil violation. Here’s an example of the argument:

It’s actually a civil violation, like jaywalking, and the process of seeking asylum is an established legal process that is protected in both domestic and international law.

It’s not clear what this person is arguing. Shall we apply immigration law selectively? After all, that’s how civil violations like jaywalking are enforced. Shall we only prosecute those who get caught? By the way, guess what else is considered, though not always, a civil violation? Trespassing. Why not compare illegal immigration to trespassing? They’re similar crimes. Like entering the country without permission, the Left doesn’t believe trespassing to be a crime, either. Unless you’re on their property, of course. Then they expect it to be treated as a crime.

Here’s another variant of the argument:

legally it’s about as “bad” as having your car registration tags expired like it’s not even criminal we’ve built a police state around civil misdemeanors at most

If we’re going to play that game, then drive around long enough on an expired car registration or license and see what happens. Civil violations become felonies in a hurry. As I’ve said before, a big problem with violating immigration law is that it leads to breaking even more laws. They serve many critical purposes, but if they serve no other purpose, they at least serve as a test to see who can be relied upon to be a citizen and who can’t, no different from a job applicant screening process.

When your first act of coming to the country is to break the first rule of coming into the country, the only way to remain in the country is to keep breaking even more rules. Either way, no country should ever indulge rule-breaking. We’d think even liberals would agree on that, but apparently not. By the way, we all know these same folks expect American natives, Whites especially, to always follow the rules. Foreigners and racial minorities get a pass. The whole point of natives playing by the rules is so foreigners don’t need to, it seems.

When you get down to it, all these arguments in defense of illegal immigration are just demands to not enforce immigration law at all. It’s that simple. Those who perpetuate these arguments are as big a problem as the illegal immigrants themselves, maybe more so. Something will have to be done about them at some point; what that is, I’m not sure.

What Does The Public Think Of All This?

Bottom line up front: the riots, nor his response, have helped Trump. Here’s what the public thinks of the deployment of military troops to Los Angeles:

Source

There’s a strange delusion on the Right, currently, that Trump can help his cause by cracking down on the protests, shutting them down completely. We’re not in 1972 any longer, unfortunately. We’ll talk more about this in a second, but the “silent majority,” to the extent it still exists, sees protest and unrest as something so normal, there’s no real stomach for cracking down on it. It’s also not true, as some have said, that failing to crack down on the 2020 riots hurt Trump’s re-election prospects. He was always going to be blamed for it, anyway, and it wasn’t just about the chaos; it was about Trump’s overall chaotic handling of the matter, seen as exacerbating the situation more than being calm and controlled.

Worse, the public has a negative outlook on the overall deportation effort to date:

Source

This, despite in the run-up to last year’s election, public sentiment was mostly behind mass deportations.

Polling is a fraught, inexact science. Confirmation bias plays a big role in whether someone accepts the outcome of a survey. Many people have a hard time getting out of their bubbles or understanding that anecdotes don’t amount to facts, and they most certainly aren’t necessarily indicative of broader public opinion.

Still, it’s worth noting other polls show something different:

Source

How do we reconcile all this? By remembering we’re still early in this crisis. Public opinion on the BLM protests of 2020 was initially positive, but turned negative the longer they went on and the more violent they became. Which highlights another problem: Americans’ tolerance for civil unrest. Americans no longer bat an eyelash over riots because they happen so often with such ferocity, and also because the ruling class has created a chilling effect making Americans feel uncomfortable about criticizing unrest under the rubric of the freedom to protest so most of the time, they don’t. Meanwhile, those who do talk about it speak out in support of it, because they pay no price for doing so.

Tolerance for civil unrest eventually leads to a situation like in France, where violent riots happen all the time. The idea that any of this is normal is absurd, but it can become entrenched if state and society allow it to become normalized. I don’t know about France, but in the U.S., protest has been foolishly upheld as the most sacred of rituals, to the point that there’s no way to draw a clear line between peaceful and violent protest. In fact, one of the things the Left did during its long march through the institutions was to validate left-wing protests as entirely legitimate, no matter how violent they became, while right-wing protests, even when peaceful, were wholly invalidated. Basically, the Left is given a pass because it protests for the “right” reasons, while the Right is always condemned because they always protest for the “wrong” reasons.

The Left would like us to believe a society which doesn’t tolerate violent demonstrations isn’t a free society. If then, America might be free, but that doesn’t make it a nice place to live. In countries like Singapore, protests require a permit and they must remain peaceful. Peaceful in the sense of the actual definition, not in the leftist sense. In fact, most protests we see out of the Left in the U.S. would run afoul of the law in Singapore and punishments would be harsh, considered excessive by our standards. Even in a free speech society such as ours, the idea that this allows for the disorder and pandemonium we see in our protests is a stretch.

Back to the Los Angeles protests. Divisive as immigration might be, it appears most Americans find it to be unjustified:

Source

Strangely, Americans feel the protesters themselves are mostly peaceful, though this is probably skewed by a plurality of Democrats:

Source

What to make of this? Very simply, Americans are conflicted, often leading them to hold seemingly contradictory viewpoints at once. More important, most polls show that immigration simply isn’t an overriding concern for most Americans. The economy consistently ranks as a the top issue; to the extent Americans are worried about immigration, they also don’t see it as something the government should be devoting most of its attention to.

This may burn many on the Right, who feel immigration to be the most important issue of our time. I happen to agree, but I also understand why most of the public doesn’t share this view. This isn’t Europe, where most of the foreign-origin population are African, Middle Eastern, and Muslim, thoroughly useless, and utterly hostile to the native population. More importantly, in Europe, it really is too late. In America, it’s still theoretically possible to correct the problem, it’s just that people prefer to not prioritize doing so until it turns into a full-blown proverbial five-alarm fire.

Unfortunately, by then, it’s too late. History proves time and again every peoples learn the hard way. America will be no different, it seems.

Yes, Virginia, The Protests Are Sponsored

The mainstream is catching on to the fact there’s something fishy about the Left’s protests:

TV cameras have captured boxes of "bionic shields" being distributed to protesters in Los Angeles on Monday.

Footage of the scene showed boxes of solid, full-face masks—almost akin to helmets—being handed out from the back of a pickup truck by two women while a masked driver waited for them to unload the goods.

The footage has sparked concerns among some that external agitators are facilitating riots by equipping crowds for potential clashes with the police or National Guard. However, others say the masks are safety gear, worn as a precaution after protesters were injured by rubber bullets that the authorities fired.

Of course, we all knew: many of these protests are incited by political activist groups on the Left, not just the far-left, either. The Left and the Democratic Party relies extensively on activists and mobilizing them for street action to disrupt, subvert, and even terrorize to get their way. None of this is a surprise to anyone, except the mainstream media. At least one person has been arrested for supplying equipment for use by protesters in potential clashes with law enforcement. Not much is known about this person, but there are unconfirmed reports of affiliations with a labor union and a Chicano nationalist paramilitary group.

In fact, one thing which separates the riot season of 2025 to 2020 is that Americans appear less willing to take for granted that these protests are peaceful than before. In 2020, everyone lost their minds due to the response to COVID and were willing to completely dispense with sanity, but not only did people snap back to reality the longer the protests went on, we currently don’t have anything like COVID driving a collective delusion.

Tal Fortgang summarizes in City Journal how manufactured these protests are:

The new dominant form of organized crime has shown its face in Los Angeles in recent days. Though it comes under the banner of “protest” and is whitewashed in the media as “mostly peaceful” and presumed spontaneous, a close observer can see that it is none of these things. It is in fact the result of a calculated civil terrorism movement taking advantage of Americans’ reluctance to treat criminals as criminals.

Images and videos from the riots give the game away. Why are there keffiyehs everywhere? What does Palestinianism have to do with preventing the federal government from enforcing immigration law, and how did the rioters know to show up covering their faces with the same symbolic gear? Who brought gas masks by the truckload? Who managed to convince hundreds of people to take up rock-throwing, Molotov cocktail-dropping, and arson at seemingly arbitrary places and times? Who laid the groundwork for street violence by training people in the tactics that prevent law enforcement from ending it promptly? As domestic-extremism expert Kyle Shideler puts it, this violence is “not black magic, it’s just hard work.”

But just as it is not black magic—not orchestrated down to fine details by mob bosses—neither is it grassroots. Nothing about this “protest” is organic. It is organized, activated, and AstroTurfed—and it has a hard time sticking to script. When Students for Justice in Palestine chimes in to say that “from the barrios of LA to the refugee camps of Bethlehem, we will globalize the intifada,” it makes the unrest look less like an expression of outrage against immigration policy than a lashing out against the rule of law itself.

It will still cloak itself in the language of law and democracy. It gets significant help from credulous media reporting, like CNN’s claim that “protests in and around Los Angeles erupted on Friday after federal immigration agents arrested at least 44 people.” A protest is when people peaceably assemble for a redress of grievances. What has transpired in Los Angeles is wanton property destruction, assaults on cops, and exuberant lawlessness.

None of this stands any chance of showing the American people that the government’s actions are wrong and the “protesters” are right. All it can do is show that the rioters are loose cannons, and that Americans ought to be afraid of what they might do. It is the opposite of democratic.

He’s right: there’s nothing democratic about a “fiery, but mostly peaceful” protest. For democracy to work, everyone has to play by the same rules. Either all causes are valid for protest or none are. There shouldn’t be this much debate over what’s peaceful or not, either. We all know what’s peaceful, it’s just that the Left has to play its usual word games to carve out exceptions for itself.

Also in City Journal, Rafael Mangual explains how even the Left is realizing it has a violence problem:

Even some of the president’s critics who have called for an end to the violence seem motivated less by the belief that property destruction and assaults on police are wrong, and more by concerns that such unrest could bolster support for immigration enforcement or damage Democrats politically. Governor Newsom warned Angelinos not to “fall into the trap that extremists are hoping for.” The Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh, an open-borders advocate, lamented that “[s]upport for nativism depends on chaos,” and argued that “[s]upport for mass deportations would wither without rioting.” But who are the extremists in this situation? Surely it’s the angry group of rioters setting cars ablaze and hurling rocks at passing police vehicles from highway overpasses.

And:

Democrats face a real political problem. It’s not hard to see how this most recent episode of “fiery, but mostly peaceful” protests could boost support for the president’s immigration enforcement campaign— especially given that many of those wreaking havoc in L.A. are waving the Mexican flag or burning the flag of the country in which they demand illegal immigrants be allowed to stay.

Consider the contrast: on one side, an administration following through on the president’s promise to strengthen immigration enforcement, in part to make cities safer; on the other, rioters waving foreign flags and setting streets ablaze. It’s hard to imagine a more unsympathetic image for the president’s critics.

That said, these protests aren’t going to get any more peaceful. Instead, they’re likely to get more violent. Deteriorating conditions and a more contentious political environment escalates tensions. Moreover, these protests are actually quite effective in the sense it puts authorities on its back foot and terrorizes the public into submission. Everyone might hate the mob, but no one dares stand up to it, either.

As I explained in the prior section, the Overton window also hasn’t shifted enough to where Americans are again comfortable with protesting the protests. But shifting norms isn’t always everything. Just as important is when everyone largely thinks the same way they did before, but they’re not willing to waste energy and time to defend their position any longer.

What Does An ICE Raid Really Looks Like?

Madeleine Rowley rode along with federal agents during immigration enforcement operations, getting a firsthand look at how it really all goes down.

The biggest lesson she learned is how manpower and resource-intensive immigration enforcement actually is, and the scale of the challenge, given the number of illegals in-country:

Suffice it to say, this is a serious and seriously resource-intensive undertaking. But ICE said it made 118 arrests only in Los Angeles last week, including five alleged gang members. The group arrested 2,300 people nationwide on Thursday—the most arrests it has ever made in one day.

I saw how much manpower it takes to pursue even a small number of illegal immigrants during the morning I spent with law enforcement. At the Sunoco gas station, three FBI agents, three ICE officials, and two officers from Enforcement and Removal Operations, a division of ICE, assembled and then moved to a new meeting spot four blocks away at the Capital Area Food Bank on Puerto Rico Avenue.

Though the Left would like everyone to believe ICE is indiscriminate in its duties, this isn’t the case:

De La O-Hernandez told the officers that he had lived in the U.S. since 2005 and had just seen his daughter off to prom. He is known as a “collateral” arrest, an illegal immigrant who isn’t being targeted because he has no other criminal record, but was encountered during a search for someone else.

“We focus on criminal targets, so a majority of our cases are criminal,” said Baker. “But during the prior administration, we really couldn’t take any collaterals into custody that we encountered, and now we can.”

Basically, if you’re an illegal, you’re likely to associate with other illegals. Therefore, it’s not surprising that so many people, including those who haven’t committed crimes (besides entering the country illegally, of course), are getting caught up in the dragnet. It also explains why even citizens and legal residents are getting swept up, though this is definitely something which needs to be scrutinized and avoided to the extent possible. I say “avoided,” because there are always risks in associating with illegals, regardless of one’s own legal status.

There’s also no opportunity for illegals to ever become citizens of the country:

Nearly two-thirds of the illegal immigrants in the U.S. as of 2019 had lived here for at least a decade, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “He had 20 years to try and get legal status,” Covington said about De La O-Hernandez after he and Colmenarez-Flores were taken away.

Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a lawyer and policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, told The Free Press that it is very difficult for illegal immigrants to adjust their status from within the U.S. “There’s a common misperception that if people are in the U.S. for a long time, they have a path to legal status, and for a lot of people, that’s just not the case,” she said. “Claiming asylum is one of the few ways to be able to do that, which is one of the reasons that a lot of people apply.”

Obviously, if you enter a country illegally, you’re not going to be able to get permission to stay any more than you would if you sneaked into a sporting event and got caught. That’s just common sense. If illegals are entering this country under the impression that, if they stay long enough, they can attain legal status, who’s giving them that impression? And do we need to do something about those people, too?

More:

For example, to get a green card, most illegal immigrants would have to leave the U.S. to apply, but leaving the country triggers a three-year ban on reentering the U.S. for anyone who lived in the U.S. illegally for less than a year, and a 10-year ban if they lived in the U.S. for a year or more, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Which only serves to underscore the importance of not entering the country illegally. There’s no upside to doing so. There are very few places in the world where taking up residence without permission is something you can get away with and I don’t think the U.S. should be on the same list with those places. I don’t think having a two-tier immigration system is a good idea, either. But apparently many Americans disagree - if they won’t let you in, just break in.

At least it’s consistent with their overall worldview.

Did Trump Break The Law?

The president’s decision to federalize and deploy the California National Guard, along with sending in the Marines, has obviously generated considerable controversy. Conventional wisdom holds that the president can do neither without the state’s expect consent.

While this might’ve been what was intended when laws governing domestic use of military force were initially drafted, how the law has been employed in practice is a different matter. Precedent often rules the day when it comes to the law, because consistency is the only way it actually makes sense in reality.

Should Trump be in trouble? Let’s ask the best civil-military scholar in the business, Charles Dunlap of Duke University. He explains:

The President’s memorandum itself limits the scope of the troops’ mission to performing a protective function. Specifically, the troops are to “protect ICE and other United States Government personnel who are performing Federal functions, including the enforcement of Federal law, and to protect Federal property, at locations where protests against these functions are occurring or are likely to occur based on current threat assessments and planned operations.”

An argument can be made that merely protecting federal agents who are enforcing the law and protecting federal property (as opposed to immigration enforcement activities such as arresting people) are not actions requiring a Posse Comitatus exception.

As far as needing a state governor’s say-so to deploy troops domestically:

Nothing in the law indicates any requirement for the Governor to consent to federalization, or that he be consulted beforehand. The statute does say that the orders “shall be issued through the governors of the States,” but that is not sufficient to find the governors have a veto power over the deployment. In my view, it is a ministerial act that does not create rights for the governor.

After a judge declared Trump’s actions illegal and for control of the California National Guard to be returned to Governor Newsom, an appeals court temporarily overturned the ruling. It appears we have a tug-of-war underway over control of California’s state militia, just the sort of issues civil wars stem from. I’m not saying this is going to be the casus belli for our next civil war, but I’m saying that this is exactly the kind of conflict which leads to shooting. If the situation cannot be resolved politically, well, what else is there to do?

Deporting Illegals Is National Suicide, Really

We’ll close by tackling one more pro-illegal immigration argument. I’m a big believer in the principle of Not Everything Needs A Response, especially since a lot of what we see and hear out there, especially on social media, is a bunch of nonsense lacking substantive arguments. In fact, the point isn’t even to make an argument, but to tug heartstrings, “own” the opposition, and slam the door shut on any debate. We’re above that here, though. We win arguments, right?

Here’s a mind-blowing tweet I saw the other day:

We are committing national suicide.

The fact that we’re doing it for no reason will fascinate future historians.

For their benefit, I’ll note now, the reason is our civic culture.

You can’t do self government with a bunch of people who can’t name their senators.

Excuse my vulgarity, but what the fuck is she talking about? National suicide? What about deporting illegal immigrants constitutes national suicide? If anything, allowing millions to enter illegally and inducing demographic change is national suicide. No society has survived mass immigration, ever. It’s the fact that America chose to destroy itself by bringing in the entire world that’ll fascinate future historians, not the fact that we tried to force them out.

As for our civic culture, nobody who considers themselves educated should be surprised that a government of this scale of a population of this scale cannot self-govern effectively. We live in a country where our elected representatives represent hundreds of thousands, even millions. This is a scale of democracy unprecedented in history. There’s a reason why even Plato said thousands of years ago that mass democracy doesn’t work.

Also left unsaid is how mass immigration is supposed to make things better. It clearly doesn’t. Like universal franchise, mass immigration undermines democracy by cheapening citizenship and votes. It just doesn’t count for much at the scale we’re subjecting it to. There’s a much deeper discussion about the flaws inherent in our form of governance, but for now, it’s enough to say that democracy is failing not because of civic culture or because of so-called “authoritarians.” It’s failing because we tried to make everyone Americans and we tried to let everyone vote. It’s nice idea, but not all nice ideas survive first contact with reality.

It seems as though this person is co-opting what were traditional conservative, right-wing principles as liberal, left-wing principles. Maybe this is par for the course - after all, I’ve been the one saying this whole time that the Left are now the conservatives, while the Right are the radicals. I’ll agree with this person on one thing: we are committing national suicide. But it’s people like her who are killing us. What price should she pay?

Let’s talk about it - what are your thoughts on the continuing riots and the response to it? What are your arguments for refuting the pro-illegal immigration crowd? What do you think happens next? What are your thoughts on anything we discussed today?

Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

If you liked this post from We're Not At the End, But You Can See It From Here, why not share? If you’re a first-time visitor, please consider subscribing!