Question

Im writing a paper on how immigration should be legal since we stole all of our land from the native americans anyway...any ideas on how to start or places to go for research?

Answer 1

You should start by defining your thesis more clearly. By calling your paper "Immigration should be legal, because we stole land from the Native Americans" you shoe horn yourself into it and doesn't give any course for discussion of the matter. Instead make your thesis into something along the lines of "Should Immigration be unrestricted?" You'll find you will have an easier time exploring both sides of an issue, than one facet of one side of an issue.

Answer 2

You might also want to ask who the native americans stole it from - surely you don't think the Souix or Cheyennes or Blackfeet were the original settlers - you can learn about their history too if you want to. They didn't just appear, they migrated and had conflicts over the land too. Its a curious thesis - If it was wrong for us to "steal" it from them, why is it right for you to want others to come in and continue to steal it from them? Shouldn't we all just go away and leave it to the native amerticans... or whomever they stole it from?

Answer 3

If we conscienceously stole it from them we would be in the wrong, and there are some instances where we did just that. For the most part, however, the huge influx of settlers made the takeover inevitable, the few times the British, and then American, governments tried to preserve uniform boundries in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were simply ignored, or their statues were outdated by the time they took effect.

When does a mistake or grievance justify a breakdown of soveignty?

Also, a point to be considered is that the total population of the Americas when clumbus landed is estimated at 20 million, 18 million of whom died from dieses. In what was to become the U.S. there were not more than 1 million natives. Over 60% of these were absorbed into our culture, relatively few were killed by us. I'm not supporting Manifest destiny, but we did vastly improve the lives of the natives, and as to taking their land, it was a story of the people taking, and then the government adapting continually. If you want a good read on the subject Paul Johnson's 'History of the American people' is a disinterested veiw.

I would like to make the above more coherent but I have to go on a patrol in Afganistan, where we are hopefully improving other impoverished lives. (not so sure)

Answer 4

"but we did vastly improve the lives of the natives," have you ever been to a reservation? We did not improve their lives at all. How you can go from a near utopian society to being restricted to crappy pieces of land and exploited to hell and back, is not an idea of improvement.

Answer 5

Near Utopian is near to Vastly improved on the exaggeration scale. The native people suffered from War, Famine, and Disease without our help. Not a single note of Kumbaya , may I, say was ever sung.

Answer 6

near utopian - man, learn some history. Constant warfare between tribes, kidnapping murder raids, slavery... get real

Answer 7

Well, to be fair, Eurpoeans were quite aware of the existence of a native population , even prior to Columbus. Columbus was actually not the first European to explore this part of the world. Second, if accepted history and science is to be believed, then all of the people who lived in North and South American came across a land bridge a long tie ago.
As to the topic of this papaer--I retriceume you refer to the plight of undocumented workers. If I were you , I would actually adjust the thesis. Although you make a good point about the origins of land ownership, its a weak historical argument. Instead maybe focus your argument on the role that undocumented workers play in the economy, the effects that NAFTA and US foreign policy has ahd on their nations of origin, and also point out that anti-immigrant sentiments are not new in the United States. In fact they occur in every generation against a new target, and sometimes the same target, and these sentiments are intended to drive a wedge between working people in this country in order to keep wages down and profits high.