The Original Illegal Aliens

We love the phrase. It is stitched into our passports and preached from our pulpits. “We are a nation of immigrants.” It is meant to be a balm, a unifying myth that suggests we all arrived here with the same humble intentions, looking for a better life. It paints a picture of huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

But it is a lie. And it is a dangerous one.

Applying the word “immigrant” to the early European settlers is not just historically inaccurate. It is an act of erasure. It sanitizes a history of conquest and genocide, turning a crime scene into a block party. The people who arrived on these shores in the 17th and 18th centuries were not immigrants. They were colonizers. The distinction is not semantic. It is the difference between joining a neighborhood and burning it down to build a replica of your old home.

To understand the difference, strip away the romance and look at the mechanics.

Imagine it happening today. A group of people arrives in New York. They do not speak the language. They do not recognize the government. They do not apply for a visa or wait in a queue. They declare that their God has given them the entire tri-state area. They set up checkpoints, kick the residents out of their homes at gunpoint, and force the population into tiny, fenced-off zones in the poorest parts of New Jersey.

Would we call them “immigrants looking for a better life”? Or would we call them an invading force? We know the answer. The only reason we do not apply this logic to the settlers is because they won. The winner gets to write the dictionary.

Immigrants enter an existing society and subject themselves to its laws. They ask permission. They seek to integrate, or at least to coexist. The early settlers did none of this. They arrived on a continent inhabited by sovereign nations with their own laws, borders, and governments. They did not seek to join the Haudenosaunee Confederacy or the Powhatan Chiefdom. They sought to replace them. They came to conquer.

This was not a secret. It was the stated policy. The colonial charters from the British Crown did not authorize immigration. They authorized occupation. The Doctrine of Discovery, a legal framework used to justify the seizure of land, declared that Christian nations had a divine right to claim lands inhabited by non-Christians. This is not immigration policy. This is a blueprint for theft.

But the lie goes deeper than policy. It relies on a specific legal fiction known as Terra Nullius, or “Nobody’s Land.” To justify the seizure, the settlers had to pretend the land was empty. They had to look at thriving villages, complex trade networks, and sovereign territories and see nothing but wilderness. By calling themselves “settlers” or “immigrants,” they reinforced the idea that there was no “there” there before their arrival. It was a psychological trick as much as a legal one. You cannot immigrate to a vacuum. You can only invade a place that is already inhabited.

We also need to remember that these settlers had a choice. They were not destined to be conquerors. When the Pilgrims landed, they were weak, starving, and wholly unprepared for the environment. The Wampanoag people had every right to view them as a hostile incursion. Instead, they taught them to farm, to fish, and to survive. For a brief moment, a different path was possible. The settlers could have become what they claimed to be: immigrants joining a new society. But as soon as they were strong enough, they turned on their hosts. They chose conquest over coexistence. They chose the gun over the hand that fed them.

This distinction is vital for understanding our modern hypocrisy.

Today, the descendants of these colonizers are often the loudest voices demanding “law and order” at the border. They scream about “illegal aliens” and the sanctity of the rule of law. They demand that newcomers follow the rules, wait their turn, and respect the sovereignty of the United States.

The irony is staggering. It is the equivalent of a squatter breaking into your house, changing the locks, and then calling the police to arrest you for knocking on the front door because you don’t have a key. The ancestors of these moralizers did not follow the rules. They did not respect the sovereignty of the nations they encountered. They were the original illegal entrants. They did not ask for permission to enter. They took the land by force, broke every treaty they signed, and committed genocide to secure their footing. The “rule of law” they champion is built on a foundation of lawlessness.

If the modern United States applied the same standards to the Mayflower that it applies to a migrant caravan today, the passengers would have been detained and deported. Or, more likely, the indigenous nations would have been within their rights to defend their borders with lethal force. We celebrate the settlers for doing exactly what we demonize modern migrants for: crossing a border without permission.

But there is a difference in scale. A modern migrant might cross a desert to find work or safety. They might contribute to the economy and pay taxes. The early settlers crossed an ocean to claim ownership of a continent. They brought smallpox, warfare, and a system of land ownership that was alien to the people already here. The migrant wants a job. The colonizer wants the deed to your house.

We cannot fix the past. But we can stop lying about it. We can stop using language that turns conquest into a passive event. When we call the settlers immigrants, we are participating in the final stage of the genocide. We are agreeing that the indigenous nations never really existed, that there was no “here” here before the Europeans arrived. We are saying that the land was empty and the violence was minimal.

The United States is a nation of immigrants. That is true for millions who came later, through Ellis Island and other ports, seeking refuge and opportunity. But it is not the whole truth. It is not the foundational truth.

We are also a nation of colonizers. We are a nation built on stolen land by people who came to conquer, not to coexist. We will never understand our history, or our current politics, until we learn to tell the difference.

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