We begin, as we always must, at the table. It is the fourth Thursday in November, a day sanctified by football, gluttony, and a collective national hallucination regarding the year 1621. You are sitting there, perhaps a little tight in the waistband, staring at a centerpiece made of miniature gourds and construction paper turkeys. Your aunt is explaining her recipe for green bean casserole, which involves opening two cans and praying for a miracle. Your uncle is explaining why the people walking across the southern border are an existential threat to “our” way of life.
And there it is. The irony. It hangs in the air, thicker than the gravy, more indigestible than the stuffing.
We are gathered to celebrate a myth. We are taught from kindergarten that Thanksgiving was a polite potluck between friendly Pilgrims with shiny buckles and generous Wampanoag neighbors who just happened to have extra corn lying around. It is a Pinterest-ready tableau of racial harmony and harvest joy.
Rip the construction paper turkeys off the wall. Burn the Hallmark card. Because the story we tell ourselves is not history; it is a crime scene cleanup.
The actual history of this continent after 1492 is not a story of friendly dinners. It is a story of apocalyptic disease, systemic theft, broken treaties, and industrial-scale violence. It runs from the Pequot Massacre at Mystic—where colonists set fire to a village and shot those who tried to escape—to the Trail of Tears, where the government forced thousands to march to their deaths to clear real estate for white settlers. It runs through the boarding schools designed to “kill the Indian, save the man,” institutions that were less about education and more about cultural erasure and abuse. It runs through the reservation system, which corralled surviving nations onto the least fertile land available, stripping them of sovereignty and resources while we congratulated ourselves on “Manifest Destiny.”
But today, let’s focus on the specific, biting comedy of the Thanksgiving table conversation. We are currently living through a political era defined by a hysterical fear of “invasion.” We are told that “illegal aliens” are pouring into the country, refusing to assimilate, bringing crime, bringing disease, and taking what belongs to “us.”
Let’s look at the Pilgrims again.
They arrived without visas. They did not speak the language. They did not respect the local laws. They brought contagious diseases that decimated the population. They were religious extremists fleeing a government that found them too radical. They settled on land that wasn’t theirs, often literally building their homes on the sites of Indigenous villages emptied by the plagues they introduced. They refused to integrate. They imposed their religion at gunpoint. And eventually, they took over the entire neighborhood.
If you are looking for the original “illegal aliens” who refused to learn the language and destroyed the local culture, look at the guy in the tall hat on the centerpiece.
The irony is structural. Almost every single MAGA talking point about “illegals taking our land, our jobs, our way of life” is a perfect, accidental description of what Europeans did to Indigenous nations from the 1600s through the late 1800s. The only difference is that the Europeans had better PR and more gunpowder.
So when your uncle screams about the “invasion” at the southern border, he is participating in a centuries-long performance piece. He is the descendant of uninvited settlers, standing on stolen land, yelling at desperate people for doing a much more peaceful version of what his ancestors did. The fence, the ID systems, the militarized patrols—these are things Native Americans never asked for, but now live under too. We built the wall, but we built it around the people we robbed.
Part II: The Settler Project and the Panic Cycle
To understand why this hypocrisy is so durable, we have to zoom out. We have to look at immigration not as a series of crises, but as the engine of the American project. The United States has always been a settler colonial enterprise layered on top of Native dispossession and African enslavement. It is a country built on the movement of people—some forced, some voluntary, some desperate.
And for almost as long as we have been a country, we have been freaking out about the “wrong” kind of people showing up.
Every generation has its moral panic. In the mid-19th century, it was the Irish. They were depicted in cartoons as subhuman, violent drunks who were loyal to the Pope rather than the Constitution. “No Irish Need Apply” wasn’t a meme; it was a labor policy. Then it was the Chinese. We happily used their labor to build the transcontinental railroad, the infrastructure that made the modern American economy possible, and then we thanked them by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first law to explicitly ban a specific ethnic group. We wanted the work; we didn’t want the workers.
Then it was the Italians, the Jews, the Poles. In 1924, we passed the National Origins Act to strictly quota the number of “undesirable” Southern and Eastern Europeans, because the eugenicists of the time were terrified that the “Nordic stock” of America was being diluted. Sound familiar? It’s the “Great Replacement Theory” with a monocle and a sepia filter.
Now, the panic is focused on Mexicans, Central Americans, Haitians, and Venezuelans. The rhetoric hasn’t changed; only the targets have. We are told they are “poisoning the blood” of the country. We are told they are criminals. We are told they are a drain on the economy.
This brings us to the modern scam. We have created a global economic system—neoliberal capitalism—that allows capital to cross borders with zero friction. Money can move from New York to Mexico City to Beijing in a millisecond. Corporations can move factories to wherever labor is cheapest and regulations are loosest. But human beings? Human beings are criminalized for trying to follow the money.
We signed NAFTA, which flooded Mexico with subsidized American corn, destroying the livelihoods of millions of Mexican farmers. When those farmers moved north to find work in the factories that had also moved, we called them criminals. We spent decades destabilizing governments in Central America, funding coups, training death squads, and supporting dictators to protect the interests of fruit companies and Cold War ideology. When the people fleeing the resulting violence and poverty showed up at our door, we called them an “invasion.”
We create the conditions that force migration, and then we punish the migrants for the audacity of trying to survive. It is like burning down someone’s house and then arresting them for loitering on your lawn.
Part III: The Economic Sleight of Hand
Why does this work? Why do so many Americans, many of whom are struggling themselves, buy into this narrative? Because it is the greatest magic trick in American politics. It is a sleight of hand designed to distract you from the person actually picking your pocket.
The top 1 percent of Americans hoard record wealth. The gap between CEO pay and worker pay has exploded to grotesque levels. Corporate profits are at all-time highs. And yet, the average worker is told that the reason they can’t afford rent, the reason their wages are stagnant, the reason the schools are underfunded is because of… the asylum seeker.
It is a mathematical absurdity. The family crossing the Rio Grande with a backpack did not outsource your factory job. They did not write the tax code that allows Amazon to pay zero federal income tax. They did not deregulate Wall Street and cause the 2008 crash. They did not create the private equity firms that are buying up single-family homes and jacking up rents.
The “illegal immigrant” is the perfect scapegoat because they have no political power. You can blame them for everything, and they can’t vote you out.
But here is the darker truth: the system wants them here, but it wants them illegal. The agricultural sector, the construction industry, the hospitality industry—they rely on undocumented labor. They need it. If every undocumented worker disappeared tomorrow, the economy would collapse before lunch. The price of milk would triple. Construction sites would go silent.
The point of the “illegal” status is not to deport everyone; it is to keep them terrified. It is to keep them compliant. An undocumented worker cannot form a union. They cannot report safety violations. They cannot demand overtime pay. They can be exploited, abused, and underpaid with impunity, because if they complain, you just call ICE.
The precarity is the point. The border crisis is not a failure of enforcement; it is a success of labor discipline. It creates a permanent underclass of workers who have no rights, which drives down wages for everyone else. The politician screaming about the border is often funded by the industries that rely on the people crossing it.
Part IV: The Thanksgiving We Need
So, back to the table. Back to the turkey and the tension.
We need to stop treating Thanksgiving as a historical reenactment of a friendship that never existed. We need to see it for what it is: a yearly reminder of the foundational lie. We are celebrating a harvest on land that was cleared by disease and violence. We are feasting in a home built on displacement.
This doesn’t mean you can’t eat the pie. Pie is delicious. But it means we need to consume it with a side of reality. We need to recognize that the “legacy Americans” at the table—the ones shouting about “law and order”—are the beneficiaries of the greatest illegal land grab in human history.
When we talk about “immigration reform,” we shouldn’t be talking about higher walls or crueler detention camps. We should be asking why people are moving. We should be talking about our foreign policy. We should be talking about climate change, which is going to drive millions more people from their homes in the coming decades. We should be talking about a trade policy that values human dignity as much as it values corporate profits.
And we should be talking about the Indigenous nations that are still here. They are not characters in a history book. They are sovereign nations fighting for water rights, for land back, for the honoring of treaties that the US government violates to this day. The Wampanoag people are still in Massachusetts. They didn’t vanish after the first Thanksgiving. They survived.
The “culture war” over immigration is a distraction. It is a flare thrown up to keep us from looking at the real looting. The looting is happening in the boardroom, not at the border. The inequality is engineered by the tax code, not the visa lottery.
So this year, when the conversation turns to the “crisis” at the border, maybe lean in. Ask your uncle if he knows about the Chinese Exclusion Act. Ask him about the 1924 quotas. Ask him if he knows that the Pilgrims didn’t have green cards.
Remind him that we are all just squatters here, arguing over who gets to lock the door. Remind him that the only people with a legitimate claim to complain about “uninvited arrivals” are the ones whose land we are currently eating on. And then, pass the potatoes. Because in America, irony is the only thing we have in unlimited supply.
Part V: The Deep Dive on the “Undesirable”
To truly appreciate the absurdity of the current moment, we have to swim through the sewage of our own legislative history. The United States has a long, proud tradition of inviting people in to do the dirty work and then legislating them out of existence when the work is done.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 is the template. We needed the railroads built. We needed the dynamite blasted through the Sierra Nevadas. Chinese workers did that. They died doing that. And the moment the golden spike was driven, the narrative shifted. Suddenly, they were “rat-eaters.” They were “opium fiends.” They were a threat to white purity. We banned them. We created a paper trail of exclusion that required Chinese Americans to carry certificates of residence—the precursor to the modern “show me your papers” laws.
Then came the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. This was the law that Hitler admired. It used a formula based on the 1890 census to specifically limit immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. Why? Because the WASP elite of the time believed that Italians, Greeks, and Jews were intellectually inferior and prone to crime. They were the “shithole countries” of the Jazz Age. The rhetoric used to describe a Jewish refugee in 1924 is almost identical to the rhetoric used to describe a Guatemalan refugee in 2025. “They don’t share our values.” “They bring disease.” “They are anarchists/communists/terrorists.”
We eventually let them in, or at least, we let their children become “white.” The Irish became cops. The Italians became mayors. The definition of “American” expanded just enough to include the people we used to hate, primarily so we could join forces to hate the new people arriving. It is the hazing ritual of American citizenship: you get to be on the inside as long as you help hold the door shut against the next guy.
Part VI: The “Legal” Myth
One of the favorite cudgels of the anti-immigrant crowd is the phrase “I’m all for immigration, if they do it the right way.”
Let’s talk about the “right way.” For the vast majority of the people currently seeking asylum or work in the United States, there is no line. There is no form they can fill out. If you are a poor farmer from Honduras, you cannot just apply for a visa. You don’t qualify. The legal pathways are restricted to the wealthy, the highly educated, or the lucky few with immediate family already here.
The “line” is a myth we tell ourselves to justify the cruelty. We pretend that there is a fair, orderly process that these rule-breakers are skipping. In reality, the process is a labyrinth designed to be a dead end.
For asylum seekers, the law requires them to be on U.S. soil to apply. They are following the law by crossing the border and turning themselves in. That is the statute. Yet we treat this legal act as an invasion. We demand they apply from their home countries, knowing full well that if they stay in their home countries, they might be dead before the paperwork clears.
The “right way” for the Pilgrims was to just show up. The “right way” for Ellis Island immigrants was to show up and not have tuberculosis. The modern “right way” is to have a PhD or a million dollars to invest. For everyone else, the door is nailed shut.
Part VII: The Capitalist Paradox
This brings us back to the central contradiction. We have built a world where a Toyota made in Mexico can cross the border tariff-free (mostly), but the guy who bolted the doors on cannot. We have globalized the economy for goods and services, but we have walled it off for labor.
This is not an accident. It is a feature of neoliberalism. By trapping workers in low-wage countries, or by keeping them undocumented in high-wage countries, capital ensures a steady supply of cheap labor. If workers could move freely, wages would equalize. If a worker in Vietnam could easily move to France, the factory in Vietnam would have to pay more to keep him.
Borders, in the 21st century, are primarily mechanisms for wage suppression. They keep the Global South poor so the Global North can buy cheap t-shirts.
And when the people of the Global South decide they are tired of being poor, when they decide to follow the wealth that was extracted from their lands, we call out the National Guard. We treat economic migration as a security threat rather than a rational market decision.
The “crisis” is that the poor have figured out where the money is.
Part VIII: The End of the Meal
So here we are. The pie is finished. The football game is over. The uncle is asleep in the recliner, dreaming of a 50-foot wall paid for by Mexico.
You are left with the dishes and the truth.
The truth is that America is a messy, violent, beautiful, hypocritical project. It is a country capable of profound generosity and staggering cruelty. We are a nation of immigrants who hate immigrants. We are a nation born of revolution that fears change. We are a nation of stolen land that is obsessed with property rights.
Thanksgiving is the perfect holiday for us because it encapsulates all of that. It is a day of gratitude built on a foundation of amnesia.
But we can choose to remember. We can choose to look at the “illegal” neighbor not as a threat, but as a mirror. They are doing exactly what our ancestors did: looking for a better life, taking a risk, and hoping that the people they meet on the other side will be kind.
The Wampanoag were kind. They shared the corn. They taught the settlers how to survive. And look what happened to them.
Maybe that’s the real fear. Maybe the people screaming about the “invasion” aren’t afraid that the immigrants will be criminals. Maybe they are afraid that the immigrants will be us. Maybe they are afraid that history is a wheel, and it’s finally turning back around.
Or maybe they’re just racist. It’s probably that one.
So, Happy Thanksgiving. Bless your heart. And please, pass the cranberry sauce. It’s the only thing on the table that’s actually native to the bog. Everything else is imported.