Apologies for the length, but not for the substance. In a country where immigrants are routinely dehumanized by those who misunderstand or ignore the truth, this couldn’t be said briefly. I chose clarity and completeness over convenience—because some things deserve the space to be said right:You hear it all the time across America—in every corner of this country, though it echoes most clearly in predominantly white, rural, and small-town places: “Why don’t they just come here legally?” It’s said like a mic drop, as if immigration were as simple as waiting in line at the DMV and filling out a few forms. But it’s not—and it never has been. The truth is, for most people around the world—especially the poor, the displaced, and those from the Global South—there is no line. There is no straightforward path. For the vast majority, there is no legal way to immigrate to the United States at all.
The people who parrot that question usually don’t know a single thing about U.S. immigration policy. They haven’t read about quotas or waitlists, and they have no idea what it actually takes to get a visa, green card, or citizenship. They don’t realize that the system is not just broken—it’s designed to exclude. It’s a maze of bureaucracy, arbitrary limits, and near-impossible requirements, particularly for those without wealth, education, or existing family connections in the U.S. Many fall back on slogans like “Follow the rules,” “Wait your turn,” or “Come the right way,” as if those options exist for everyone. They don’t. And they never did—not for today’s migrants, and not even for the European ancestors they’re so proud of.
Many of the same people who preach this way about legal immigration often proudly celebrate their own family’s immigrant roots. They talk about their German, Irish, English, Dutch, or Scandinavian ancestors who “did it the right way.” What they fail to understand—or deliberately ignore—is that those ancestors came to America during a time when there was essentially no immigration system. There were no visa requirements, no green cards, no numerical quotas. People showed up, often with little more than the clothes on their backs, and were waved in because the country wanted white settlers to displace Native populations and populate the land with white, Christian communities.
Some facts: The first federal immigration law—the Page Act—wasn’t passed until 1875, and it wasn’t about regulation as much as exclusion: specifically banning Chinese women. The Chinese Exclusion Act followed in 1882, targeting an entire ethnic group. The modern “legal immigration” system—with quotas, country caps, and green cards—didn’t begin to take shape until the Immigration Act of 1924. That law baked white supremacy into immigration policy by explicitly favoring northern and western Europeans and virtually banning everyone else, particularly Asians and Africans. And passports? The U.S. didn’t even require them consistently until World War I, and universal enforcement didn’t become standard until the 1920s. Before that, coming to America was as easy as hopping on a ship and landing at Ellis Island.
What about those green cards, you ask? The concept wasn’t formalized until the 1940s, after which the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 finally abolished the explicitly racist quota system—but it didn’t make the system fair or accessible. It just created new hoops and barriers wrapped in bureaucratic tape and double standards.
Back to those beloved ancestors. They didn’t “follow the rules” because there weren’t any. What they followed was the scent of opportunity on land that didn’t belong to them. That land was stolen—from Native tribes through military force, genocide, and broken treaty after broken treaty. Then, with cold bureaucratic precision, the U.S. government handed out vast tracts of that stolen land to white settlers through policies like the Homestead Act of 1862. Over 270 million acres were handed out this way—almost 10% of the entire U.S.—to white citizens and immigrants deemed “desirable.” These were not people escaping quotas or earning their place through some meritocratic visa process—they were beneficiaries of a state-sponsored campaign of ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism. Meanwhile, the Indigenous peoples who had stewarded that land for millennia were pushed onto tiny, often barren and economically useless reservations, stripped of their ancestral homes and ways of life. Their children were ripped from their families and shipped off to government and church-run boarding schools, where they were beaten for speaking their native languages and forced to assimilate into white, Anglo-American norms—language, dress, religion—under the twisted banner of “civilizing” them.
And let’s be crystal clear while we’re at it: this country was not built solely by white settlers. It was built—quite literally—on the backs of Black slaves, kidnapped from Africa and forced into generations of brutal, dehumanizing labor. Enslaved Africans built the Southern plantation economy that fueled American capitalism, laid the bricks of our cities, dredged canals, harvested cotton, picked tobacco, and raised the wealth of white America while being denied humanity and freedom. And while white settlers were being handed land, Black Americans were being bought, sold, whipped, raped, lynched, and later redlined, incarcerated, and economically ghettoized into second-class citizenship.
And it wasn’t just Black labor. Asian immigrants—many of whom were also kidnapped, trafficked, or coerced—played an enormous role in building this country, especially in the West. Chinese laborers built the transcontinental railroad under conditions so brutal that many died doing it. They laid the steel skeleton that tied the country together—and when the job was done, they were met with riots, exclusion acts, and segregation. Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Indian, and other Asian migrants also helped build American agriculture, shipping, and manufacturing—only to be excluded, vilified, and later incarcerated in camps for daring to exist during wartime.
These communities didn’t just contribute—they made America possible. They have every bit as much claim to this country as any descendant of Ellis Island settlers. In fact, they have more right to say who belongs here than the MAGA cultists who think citizenship should be based on melanin levels and Protestant decorum. They earned it through centuries of blood, labor, resilience, and resistance—and they’re still being told to shut up, assimilate, and “go back” by the same people who wouldn’t know a work visa from a library card.
And now? The descendants of those white settlers want to pull up the ladder behind them. They want to slam the door shut and pretend that their families bootstrapped their way into a better life purely through virtue and hard work, when in reality they were handed land soaked in Native blood and protected by a military hell-bent on erasing anyone who got in the way. They arrived with nothing and were given everything. Today’s immigrants arrive with nothing and are given cages, court dates, and contempt. Why? Simple. They’re brown and they’re poor.
What was once an open or loosely controlled frontier has morphed into a militarized apparatus—a prelude to full-on genocide exported abroad by deputizing thugs and enabling them to act like Gestapo fascist secret police, disappearing people off the streets in broad daylight, targeting those who don’t look white. This brutal display of state repression and violence is the inevitable conclusion of a society that has continued to feed on the myths and lazy, intellectually and morally bankrupt lies of those at the top, who profit off a distracted and divided working-class America.
These same folks will wave their flags and clutch their Bibles, never realizing the soul-crushing irony that Jesus himself—by today’s standards—would have been detained, denied entry, and deported. Born to a poor family, fleeing violence, and without proper documentation, he would have been seen as a threat, locked up, and put on a plane. These Americans forget that morality and legality are not the same thing—and never have been.
Today’s migrants are often fleeing not just poverty, but the direct consequences of U.S. foreign policy. For decades, the U.S. installed dictators, funded coups, trained death squads, and armed right-wing paramilitaries—so long as those regimes served American business interests. We supported brutal governments that suppressed unions and massacred civilians because it helped our corporations extract more profit. The violence, poverty, and instability that people now flee didn’t just happen. America helped create it. And now that those same people are showing up on our doorstep, Americans act shocked. We criminalize their desperation and turn them into villains.
Meanwhile, many Americans continue to blame immigrants for problems they didn’t cause. Undocumented workers didn’t outsource manufacturing, bust unions, or cause the opioid crisis. They didn’t automate away entire industries or sell family farms to agribusiness giants. That was the work of the capitalist class—the same billionaires and corporations who profit off division, who underpay workers, and who benefit from scapegoating brown people whenever working class consciousness starts to materialize. It’s easier to blame the undocumented worker cleaning hotel rooms than to question a system that has been bleeding communities dry for decades.
People want someone to blame. And for generations, politicians and media outlets have handed them a convenient target: the immigrant. That scapegoating has deep roots in American history. But it’s a lie. A distraction. And one that continues to poison our politics and our humanity, and prevent us from addressing the real causes of inequality and decline.
The ruling elite have a vested interest in maintaining an undocumented, exploitable class of people. This segment of society can be wielded both as a political cudgel and as a weapon against organized labor and social movements. Employers use the constant threat of deportation to keep wages low and silence demands for better working conditions, knowing that fear of losing their livelihood prevents many undocumented workers from asserting their rights. Politicians and interest groups exploit anti-immigrant sentiment to divide the working class, making it harder for people to unite around common economic goals. This strategy ensures that those at the top maintain power by keeping the rest distracted and fragmented.
So the next time someone says, “Why don’t they just come legally?”—don’t nod along. Don’t let it slide. It’s not a real question. It’s a shield for ignorance or cruelty—often both. Because if you’re born in the wrong country, with the wrong skin color, and no U.S. family or corporate sponsor, there is no legal path. Not now. Not ever. And pretending otherwise only deepens the injustice.
The immigration system isn’t about justice. It never was. It’s about control, exclusion, and maintaining power—deciding who gets to belong and who gets left out. And if we’re going to have an honest conversation, we need to stop pretending that legality is the same as morality, that past immigrants followed a path that never existed then, or that the people trying to come here today are anything less than human beings responding to conditions we helped create.
P.S.
Of course, there’s a lot I didn’t cover—like immigration during and after slavery, or how even those trying to “do it the right way” are set up to fail. This post isn’t exhaustive, just necessary. I’m not done writing, and I’ll be back to dig into all of that—and more—in future posts.
