Steven LaChance Blog

When people get mad at a line like that, it usually is not because it is historically wrong. It is because it cuts too close to something we are taught not to question. But maybe we should.

If you look at the history of the Americas, borders did not appear because everyone agreed politely. They came after conquest, forced removal, broken treaties, and genocide. That is not an opinion. That is the actual record. So the idea that a line on a map suddenly turns some people into “illegals” starts to feel a lot shakier once you remember how those lines were drawn in the first place.

The United States is not unique in this, but it is a clear example.

Who was here first?

Indigenous nations were here long before European settlers arrived, and they did not consent to being pushed off their land. Who would? Treaties were signed and then ignored. People were marched, relocated, and erased to make room for a new country. That history does not disappear just because time passes or because the winners wrote the textbooks. It sits underneath everything, whether we like it or not.

That does not mean borders do not exist today or that laws do not matter. It means we should be honest about where those laws came from. When someone says “no one is illegal on stolen land,” they are pointing at a moral contradiction that has always been there.

You can argue about policy, enforcement, and solutions, but history makes one thing clear: calling human beings illegal while standing on land taken by force is not as clean or righteous as people would like to believe.

Maybe if we leaned a little more on trying to understand history instead of denying it or looking away from it, things might feel different. Maybe we would approach each other with more compassion and more understanding. Because honestly, caging children over the color of their skin is just wrong.

And telling someone to “go home” when their ancestors were here long before ours feels not only insensitive and cruel, but also historically tone-deaf.