12/28/2006
There’s an extremely annoying op-ed in the New York Times. (That’s not surprising.) It’s also been picked up by the Sacramento Bee as In the beginning, illegals crossed the line
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.[Our Founding Illegals, By William Hogeland, New York Times]
This, of course, was one of the reasons for the American Revolution. George III didn’t have to live with the Indians. Buckingham Palace wasn’t going to be burned, Queen Charlotte wasn’t going to be raped, and the Duke of Clarence wasn’t going to be kidnapped because politicians in Great Britain were favorable to the Indians. The colonists, on the other hand, were right there, in fire-arrow range.
He also takes on Colonel Ethan Allen:
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.
No, not Tony Soprano-style.
Here’s another view of Ethan Allen, with emphases added:
Ethan Allen was big, powerful fellow with a long history of violence, drunkenness, and drunken violence. He'd been hired by a group of colonial financiers who'd been selling land on dodgy titles. A rival group of financiers had the legal apparatus of the colony of New York in its pocket, so Allen raised the Green Mountain Boys as muscle to deal with settlers whose land titles came from New York, as well as with the New York sheriffs who tried to back those settlers up. …
There were other interesting things about Allen. While unquestionably violent, neither he nor the violent men under his command killed anybody. That’s really remarkable.[David Drake, Note to the book Patriots]
While Hogeland wants to make illegals look good, it would be just as easy to compare modern day illegals to the wild Indians of yore, (many of them are Indians, of course, but that’s not quite the point)and President Bush II to King George III, and The New York Times [send them mail] to the colonists who toadied to the British Government.
In fact, if we're going for historical parallels, let’s compare the modern-day employers of illegals with the men who imported slaves to do work free men wouldn’t do — and produced a great Civil War.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.