What Rights, Whose Land?
By Ed Lusch
October 2007 Guadalajara-Lakeside Volume 24, Number 2

     The so-called illegal immigrant population of the US now exceeds 10 million Mexicans. About 3% of the American workforce, they are employed in jobs most US workers will not take, and rightfully so.
     The wages for these jobs are often below minimum wage, the working conditions are usually substandard, and the working hours generally longer than those allowed by law.
     Many US citizens feel that illegal aliens have no right to basic services such as hospitalization, education, or other basic rights even though most migrant workers pay social security and other taxes.
     Remove this illegal workforce and the American economy would falter and undoubtedly collapse.
     Perhaps these important workers should be looked at with a different perspective: their great grandparents once owned all the land they now clandestinely toil on as illegal immigrants.
     Until 1848, Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado were all undisputed territories of Mexico and ruled under Mexican law. But that was all to change when James Polk was elected to the US presidency in 1844 largely due to his advocacy of “Taming the Mexicans” by grabbing their land.
     He tells a cabinet secretary on inaugural night that a high-priority of his presidency is the attainment of California, which Mexico had declined to sell to the US. The Washington Union, a highly influential newspaper at that time, writes: “...The road to California is open to us. A core of properly organized volunteers would invade, overrun and occupy Mexico. They would enable us not only to take California but to keep it.”
     A rival newspaper, the Democrat Review, in a famous editorial opines: “It is our manifest destiny to overspread the continent...for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
     The long-standing border between Texas and Mexico had been the Nueces River, but President Polk with popular support and the press goading him on, promises Texas he will militarily support “adjusting” the historical border between Texas and Mexico and move it 150 miles south to the Rio Grande River, if Texas agrees to join the Union.
     Texas does agree to this condition and Polk sends troops south of the original border to the Rio Grande River. With this provocative move, Polk had incited war with Mexico.
     One of the commanders of the invading US forces, Colonel Hitchcock, writes in his diary: “...We have not one particular right to be here. We are the aggressors. It looks as if the Federal government sent this force on purpose to bring on a war. My heart is not in this business.” Of course violence erupts between US and Mexican troops. President Polk insists the Mexican troops fired first, but Congressman Abraham Lincoln insists the President name the exact location where Mexican troops fired first upon the US troops. Lincoln never received an answer.
     May 11, 1846, President Polk demands of Congress a declaration of war against Mexico. Congress does so. The day after Polk’s war plea to Congress, Horace Greeley penned those classic lines in the New York Tribune: “We can easily defeat the armies of Mexico, slaughter them by thousands, and pursue them to their capital; we can conquer and annex their territories, but what then? Who believes that a score of victories over Mexico, the annexation of half of her province will give us more liberty, or a purer morality?”
     Lincoln addresses Congress, “The President unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced a war with Mexico.” Lincoln then admonishes Congress, “...The marching of an army into the midst of peaceful Mexican settlements, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops and other properties to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly amicable, peaceful, un-provoking procedure but it does not appear so to us.”
     The Mexican army fights desperately but in vain and US forces, over a two-year period, (1846-1848) force them as far south as Mexico City. Polk now has his new Texas border at the Rio Grande River and has annexed Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and California.
     The New York Herald writes, “The universal Yankee nation can regenerate and disenthrall the people of Mexico in a few years and we believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country.” At the same time, the American Review editorializes: “The Mexicans are yielding to a superior population insensibly oozing into her territories, tainting her customs and exterminating her weaker blood.” Such were the times.
     Mexico surrendered to US forces in 1848 and ceded to the US, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, California and a “new Texas.” The government of Mexico is paid $15 million for these territories. The Whig Intelligencer Newspaper reports: “We take nothing by conquest...thank God.” The $15 million paid to Mexico for a huge chunk of her provinces was quite a large sum in 1848 but the investment paid off quickly; the California Gold Rush in 1849 alone produced hundreds of millions of dollars in gold, none of which went to the Mexican government or Mexico’s displaced landholders.
     Several years later, General Ulysses S. Grant in a statement to the American press declared: “The Mexican war was the most unjust war ever undertaken by a strong nation against a weaker one.”
     Territorial expansion by force is, of course, not unique to the US: no nation is without its pride; no nation is without its prejudice; and no nation is without its shame.’