Rules for Strategic Arguments (Pilot)

HOW TO WIN THE OPEN BORDERS ARGUMENT EVEN AGAINST EMOTIONAL PEOPLE

Image result for trail of tears open source
The Trail of Tears was a horrible crime perpetrated by the US government
under Pres. Andrew Jackson, but it's also the worst example to use in order
to justify open borders. In fact it's the best reason to treat that idea as the
idiotic pipe dream that it is. (Pinterest)

Last week I had a long and heated exchange with an impassioned young Navajo lady concerning open borders. She was making a superficially plausible argument that like US-born Native Americans people from Mexico are descendants of the First Nations, and that the REAL "illegal aliens" were white Americans that came here uninvited and stole their land.
Let me make one thing clear: I support returning more sovereignty to the Indian reservations. The current arrangement deprives them of real actionable political clout. I've also supported campaigns against Indian mascots (although not court cases) as well as the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Have I completely supported all of their causes? No. But I'm not required to say yes to everything.
Basically, her argument contained several logical BBQ pits:
Atahualpa Inca XIV.png
Inca Emperor Atahualpa was a casualty of Spanish
treachery. Yet his society was hardly the harmonious
Xanadu that critical race theorists would have you believe
(Wikimedia Commons)

  1. There were no borders and no laws preventing Euros from coming to the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, Hernán Cortes, the Spanish conquistador that conquered the Aztecs was welcomed by them due to their own mythology prophesying the arrival of a pale god known as Quetzalcoatl. We learned this in 4th grade. The Inca Empire was conquered in a roundabout way by a force of perhaps 120 Spaniards that hoodwinked a hostage Emperor Atahualpa into fighting his rival Huáscar and killing him brutally. Then the Spaniards eventually murdered Atahualpa in a barbaric and treacherous fashion too.
  2. Although ethnically the American Indians were different and therefore not "tribes", they did not form nation states in the sense that we know. In fact, this was true of many Euro countries. Germany and Italy were not united until the 1860s, and that was done through conquests and royal marriages.
  3. Many of these Indian origin advocates as I call them subscribe to the ludicrous belief that it was the Europeans that introduced war to the New World and that the Indians lived here in harmony. This sweeps aside the obvious fact that many Indians did not die just from European violence, but also from disease such as smallpox for which they had no immunity brought over from Europe. Likewise Europeans were more vulnerable to Malaria, a disease that they typically contracted in Africa.One related theory posits that the American military distributed smallpox infected blankets to American Indians in order to eradicate them. This is under dispute as it's been distributed by discredited academic Ward Churchill, so I invite more evidence from those that believe it.
  4. Related to point 3, American Indians did fight conflicts with each other, this is exactly the type of thing that the early colonists exploited in order to conquer the New World. Ever heard of the "Beaver Wars" between the Iroquois and a slew of other Indian nations like the Erie and Huron? The fact is that there has been war over lands or other resources on every continent regardless of whatever race lives there; have you never heard of the Mongol Empire and Genghis Khan? I'm not saying it justifies murdering the Indians and taking their land, but let's stop promoting a Utopian illusion of pre-Columbian America.
  5. Illegal immigration from Mexico is not exclusively limited to Mexican or even Latin American citizens. PewResearch now reports that illegal immigration from Africa is at an all time high. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that one type is better or worse than the other, but it brings lie to the belief that this is just allowing related
  6. Just like the general American population, there is no Latino race. This is why on applications and forms there is typically a separate question asking whether the applicant is "Hispanic or Latino of any race". This is well-known as there was a fairly complicated racial hierarchy casta in colonial Spanish America ranging from the peninsulares (Spain-born settlers), colonos (Spaniards and other Euros born in the Americas), mestizos (Spanish-Indian descendants), mulatos (Spanish-African descendants), indios (full-blooded Indians), and zambo (African and Indian, a possible origin of the slur "sambo"). There are also full-blooded black Latinos known in Spanish as. . . wait for it . . . negros.

Image result for 8 ball8 ball time! But let me cut through this for those of you short on time. The basic premise of their position is that Europeans are the real illegal immigrants that destroyed American Indian societies by exploiting the lack of borders. Therefore. . . what are they trying to convince Americans to do?

  • That we should allow the USA to have open borders in order that the same thing happens here?
  • To not even screen people for infectious diseases. By the way, smallpox is making a comeback and remember the Ebola and Zika scares?
  • That allowing another hostile and doctrinaire religious system to infiltrate the USA would be a good thing for anyone?
The "original Americans argument" is actually the best one AGAINST open borders. The American Indians were in most cases pre-nation state societies. All of the other myths of a harmonious pre-colonial society are based on the mistaken desire to see everything non-European or non-white as being virtuous rather than looking at the true circumstances of what happened. These are the same type of academics and their followers that believe that pre-colonial Africa was harmonious while ignoring the presence of empires and kingdoms like Buganda, Ghana and Zulu. These empires came about as a result of subjugation of neighbouring peoples that were black Africans like them.

Please write back to ask about this Rules for Strategic Arguments, or to propose a topic idea of your own for me to formulate.


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