NYT op-ed: "Our Founding Illegals"

[DeepModem Mom]

Our Founding Illegals
By WILLIAM HOGELAND
Published: December 27, 2006

EVERY nation is a nation of immigrants. Go back far enough and you’ll find us all, millions of potential lives, tucked in the DNA of our African mother, Lucy. But the immigrant experience in the United States is justly celebrated, and perhaps no aspect of that experience is more quintessentially American than our long heritage of illegal immigration.

You wouldn’t know it from the immigration debate going on all year (the bipartisan immigration bill-in-progress, announced this week, is unlikely to mention it), but America’s pioneer values developed in a distinctly illegal context. In 1763, George III drew a line on a map stretching from modern-day Maine to modern-day Georgia, along the crest of the Appalachians. He declared it illegal to claim or settle land west of the line, all of which he reserved for Native Americans.

George Washington, a young colonel in the Virginia militia, instructed his land-buying agents in the many ways of getting around the law. Although Washington was not alone in acquiring forbidden tracts, few were as energetic in the illegal acquisition of western land. And Washington was a model of decorum compared to Ethan Allen, a rowdy from Connecticut who settled with his brothers in a part of the Green Mountains known as the Hampshire Grants (later known as “Vermont”). The province of New York held title to the land, but Allen asserted his own kind of claim: He threw New Yorkers out, Tony Soprano style, then offered to sell their lots to what he hoped would be a flood of fellow illegals from Connecticut.

Meanwhile, illegal pioneers began moving across the Alleghenies and into the upper Ohio Valley, violating the king’s 1763 proclamation and a few more besides. (George would today be accused of softness on immigration; he kept shifting the line westward.) Immigrants from such déclassé spots as Germany and Ireland violated the laws and settled where they pleased. The upper Ohio was rife with illegal immigrants, ancestors of people who, in country clubs today, are implying a Mayflower ancestry....

(William Hogeland is the author of “The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty.”)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/27/opinion/27hogeland.html

[msedano]

1. Lucy is not my ancestor

Who the heck says life started only in Africa from the australopithecus critter dubbed Lucy?

There was a separate Eden. Took place in America, before there was such a name. My gente started on this side of the line and migrated from west to east, met up with Lucy's progeny somewhere around Mae Bong Mountain on the border of N and S Korea. I used to stand on the top of radar hill and hear the voices of my ancestors communing with one another and moi.

Adan y Eva were chicano and chicana.

Like it or not, folks, that's the way it was.

happy holidays.

mvs

http://readraza.com/hawk/pages/hshithouse_jpg.htm

btw, the phrase "illegal" is always offensive. no human being is "illegal". if you want an adjective, howzabout "undocumented"? after all, before one is "illegal" the individual merits due process and an immigration court has to declare the person here sans papeles and only then, "illegal". it's called the Constitution.

[silverojo]

2. Hey, reconquistador!

Save the rewriting of history for MexicaMovement.org, m'kay?

And yes, people are "illegal" if they do something to break an existing law. If nobody was illegal, there would be no prisons.

Coming to America legally...it's not just a good idea, it's the law.