Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Immigration, legal or not, is how populations act. You can accept it as fact and look for solutions or you can fight the inevitable with rancor and incivility towards newcomers. Persecution is an unsavory option. Conservatives point at the law as their justification for denial of citizenship, and they believe in punishment for breaking the law, but pragmatism suggests that democracy is for all, not just for the ones who got here first. Civil rights would never have happened without public disavowal of the law at that time, and now immigration needs other solutions than are available in the law. Unfortunately, Democrats are acting with self-serving cynicism on illegal immigration because it empowers their Party, whereas Conservatives are resentful of newcomers who receive the same benefits as them without recognizing their superior status. With unsavory motives like those, is another way to look at it?

U.S. Property Law has always recognized Adverse Possession: you must forcibly remove people you think are on your land illegally or it becomes theirs. Support for that idea is fuzzy, encompassing the mystic of land for hard labor, and disrespect for absent landlords. It can be interpreted a number of ways but one thing is for certain; people who are on the same land are in the same tribe because the things that happen to that land happen to everyone on it, so they should have a say. Democracy doesn't get more fundamental then that. This concept underlies the idea that if we allow illegal immigrants to stay in the U.S. indefinitely then they become owners too.