Immigrants

 

We argue the merits of immigration; the morality; the practicality.  We are a nation of immigrants.  One way or another though, immigrants come, they assimilate to form the new American identity, and then get to be the next generation of citizens deciding how they feel about immigrants.

 

On a broader scale, our hemisphere wasn’t always occupied by humans.  Land plants evolved about 500 million years ago.  Land animals arrived from the sea about 350 million years ago.  So for about 350 million years, North and South America were only populated by plants and animals while homo-sapiens evolved elsewhere in only the last 200,000 years or so.  Somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago, these modern humans migrated across the Bering land bridge from Asia, (North America was connected to Asia) then wandered from north to south and spread east.  The first 99.996% of the time that there have been plants and animals on the North and South American Continents, there were no humans.  None.

 

In only that last 0.004% of time have there been humans expanding their range across the continents.  We know it wasn’t always pastoral; this human occupation of the Americas.  Tribal rivalries pushed boundaries and borders back and forth.  Societies rose and fell.  But by the time the Europeans arrived, the continent was covered with Native American Nations.  The Huron, the Iroquois.  The Erie and the Shawnee.  The southern Cherokee, Chicksaw, and Choctaw.  The Dakota Sioux, the Cree.  The plains Blackfoot, Crow, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Arapahoe, Kiowa.  Mountain Flathead, Shoshone, and Ute.  The desert Hopi, Navaho, Apache.  Coastal Chinook, Yurok, Pomo tribes out west.  North of us the Inuit, Yupik, and the Aleut.  South of us, the Tamaulipec, Toltec, Aztec, Inca.  Countless tribes and nations.  Many more tribes than can be named here.  Then the Americas were “discovered”.

 

An extended wave of European immigration over a period of centuries, to a land already occupied by Native Americans.  The Native Americans had been here for thousands of years, so it would have seemed to them that they had always been here and always would be.  How must that have felt to have people from somewhere else arrive on your shores, declare they had just discovered your land, and claim it as their own?

 

The immigration from Europe became an immigration from all over the world, not all of it even voluntary.  We’re the world’s melting pot; this wave of non-native Americans having been here for about 400 years, roughly 2% of the time that Native Americans have been here; here we stand, ironically, debating the morality of immigration.  Should we allow it or shouldn’t we?

 

And that leads me to this.  There are still Native Americans here now.  You know they can hear us, right?  Don’t we feel at least a little embarrassed?