Beware of Immigrants

by poputonian

We should be very careful when criticizing the anti-Muslim, anti-immigration remarks made by Republican Representative Virgil Goode of Virginia. Sometimes it becomes necessary to defer to the sage wisdom of our elected officials. Goode (rhymes with “screwed” as Interrobang notes), no doubt recalls clear examples in history where immigrants flooded America, “swamped” the resources (as he puts it), took over all civil jurisdictions, and then manipulated the legislative process to favor their own kind and color. By the time this ugly cycle was complete, the original domestic structures of culture, power, worship, government, and tradition had been superseded by the superior values proclaimed by the immigrating people. And remember, Goode is taking the long view when he says, “I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies.” When he says that, he is acknowledging that cultural eradication can be a gradual process occurring over decades, even hundreds of years. As a pre-emptive visionary, he’s looking out for everyone’s best interest, understanding that immigrants can infiltrate and take over.

For example, in one of the earliest anti-immigration utterances on record, an Ohio Valley Indian said this to an English missionary:

“We have great reason to believe you intend to drive us away, and settle the country; or else, why do you come to fight in the land that God has given us?”
…
“Why don’t you and the French fight in the old country, and on the sea? Why do you come to fight on our land? This makes everybody believe you want to take the land from us by force, and settle it.”

The author who reported the above quotes also described how the immigrants elbowed their way into the neighborhood, basically shitting on the people who were already there:

White settlers and traders aggressively pushed into that region and prevented accommodation between the British and the Ohio Indians. These “Frontier People” sought not accommodation with the Ohio Indians but rather their removal. Compromise did not enter their thoughts, and magnanimity never governed their actions. Respecting personal freedom more than law and advocating their right to take unused land rather than to await negotiated settlements with trans-Appalachian Indians, these frontier people moved relentlessly into the Ohio Valley. By 1774, approximately fifty thousand whites lived on the trans-Appalachian frontier, and the British army could not control them. By that time, the British no longer remained the principal enemy of the Ohio Indians. Instead it was the relentless westward-moving Americans.

The Indians fought for a while, hoping to deter the unfettered waves of immigration. Eventually, though, the indigenous Indians thought it best to try to accommodate the immigrants. In 1786, the United Indian Nations sent a message to Congress. Author and professor Ralph Young writes about this in his new book called Dissent in America:

As Americans continued to encroach upon Indian lands, the native people decided to take a page out of the newborn republic’s history book. The only hope to resist American expansion was for the Indian nations to unite, just as the 13 states had united, and so, in 1786, representatives of the Shawnee, Delaware, Huron, Cherokee, Wabash, Chippewa, Ottawa, Pottawatomie, and Miami formed the United Indian Nations. They issued a message to the U.S. Congress in which they insisted that the Ohio River remain the boundary between the United States and Indian territory and that any further agreements, treaties, or sales of land had to have the unanimous consent of the United Indian Nations.

Protest To The United States Congress, 1786
SPEECH AT THE CONFEDERATE COUNCIL, NOVEMBER 28 AND DECEMBER 18, 1786
[Excerpt]
…
We are still of the same opinion as to the means which may tend to reconcile us to each other; and we are sorry to find, although we had the best thoughts in our minds, during the before-mentioned period, mischief has, nevertheless, happened between you and us. We are still anxious of putting our plan of accommodation into execution, and we shall briefly inform you of the means that seem most probable to us of effecting a firm and lasting peace and reconciliation: the first step towards which should, in our opinion, be that all treaties carried on with the United States, on our parts, should be with the general voice of the whole confederacy, and carried on in the most open manner, without any restraint on either side; and especially as landed matters are often the subject of our councils with you, a matter of the greatest importance and of general concern to us, in this case we hold it indispensably necessary that any cession of our lands should be made in the most public manner, and by the united voice of the confederacy; holding all partial treaties as void and of no effect.

Proving that cultural erosion can result from being “weak on immigration,” Professor Young documented another Indian message, this one delivered twenty-three years later:

In 1809, while Tecumseh was undertaking his diplomatic mission, William Henry Harrison, the Governor of the Indiana Territory, negotiated a treaty with several of the Ohio tribes to purchase three million acres of land in southern Indiana. Outraged, Tecumseh wrote a letter to Harrison in which he vehemently protested this purchase, which had not been unanimously endorsed by the United Indian Nations.

LETTER TO GOVERNOR WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, 1810

“The being within, communing with past ages, tells me that once, nor until lately, there was no white man on this continent; that it then all belonged to red man, children of the same parents, placed on it by the Great Spirit that made them, to keep it, traverse it, to enjoy its productions, and to fill it with the same race, once a happy race, since made miserable by the white people, who are never contented but always encroaching. The way, and the only way, to check and to stop this evil, is for all the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be yet; for it never was divided, but belongs to all for the use of each. For no part has a right to sell, even to each other, much less to strangers who want all, and will not do with less.”

See, the immigrants are taking over. And pretty soon, the only political representation for the superseded culture comes from fringe outcasts whose voices never figure prominently in political outcomes. In 1830, US Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey gave a speech in protest of the Indian Removal Bill, which was written to force those who got here first from their native lands, to be replaced on the same land by the immigrants:

Our ancestors found these people, far removed from the commotions of Europe, exercising all the rights, and enjoying the privileges, of free and independent sovereigns of this new world. They were not a wild and lawless horde of banditti, but lived under the restraints of government, patriarchal in its character, and energetic in its influence. They had chiefs, head men, and councils. The white men, the author of all their wrongs, approached them as friends — they extended the olive branch; and being then a feeble colony and at the mercy of the native tenants of the soil, by presents and profession, propitiated their good will. The Indian yielded a slow, but substantial confidence; granted to the colonists an abiding place; and suffered them to grow up to man’s estate beside him. He never raised claim of elder title; as white man’s wants increased, he opened the hand of his bounty wider and wider. By and by, conditions are changed. His people melt away; his lands are constantly coveted; millions after millions are ceded. The Indian bears it all meekly; he complains, indeed, as well, but suffers on; and now he finds that his neighbor, whom his kindness had nourished, has spread an adverse title over the last remains of his patrimony, barely adequate to his wants, and turns upon him and says, “away we cannot endure you so near us! These forests and rivers, these groves of your fathers, these firesides and hunting grounds, are ours by the right of power, and the force of numbers.” Sir, let every treaty be blotted from our records, and in the name of truth and justice, I ask, who is the injured, and who is the aggressor?

Young elaborated on the Indian Removal Bill:

Although Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen strongly opposed Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Bill that stipulated sending the Cherokee from their native Georgia to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), the bill passed both houses of Congress in 1830. The Cherokee themselves were not silent in standing up for their rights and made a strong effort first to challenge the law and then to forestall enforcement of it. Their case made it all the way to the Supreme Court. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and in Worcestor v. Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in the Cherokee’s favor. Unfortunately, a contingent of Cherokee, without the authorization of the Cherokee nation, met with representative of the U.S. Government at New Echota, Georgia, and signed a removal treaty. Once the Senate ratified the Treaty Of New Echota, President Jackson had the authority he needed to force the removal.
…
[The Cherokee were ] forced … at bayonette point from their lands in Georgia and relocated to a reservation in present-day Oklahoma. It has been estimated that as many as 15,000 of the 60,000 Indians died on the “Trail of Tears.”

Give immigrants an inch and they’ll take a country. Can you blame Representative Goode for wanting to forestall his own removal to a reservation in Oklahoma, or somewhere else in the interior of the country? The man has vision.