Billie Eilish Is Confused About Borders

At this year’s Grammy Awards, singer Billie Eilish took the opportunity to criticize America’s immigration policies, saying, “no one is illegal on stolen land.” While the line garnered plenty of applause, few in the audience seemed to realize that the statement, while pithy, is actually self-contradictory and logically incoherent.

If land can be “stolen,” it means there’s an owner.

Eilish is suggesting that the rightful owners of North American land are Native Americans… who spent thousands of years violently battling each other over territory, just as everyone has done all over the planet throughout all of human history.

The Lakota Nation didn’t just spring out of the earth on the land they now claim as their ancestral heritage, after all. They fought bloody wars with other tribes and with smaller groups of people already on that land who they killed or enslaved as a condition of conquest.

Eventually, Europeans with better weapons and superior technology arrived on the continent, and they were themselves conquered… or, quite often actually, simply paid for their territory without excessive bloodshed.

Anyway, apart from being a generally ignorant point, it’s also self-contradicting as one of the biggest lessons anyone probably *should* take from the decline of Native populations in America is that if you want a society, culture, and territory to remain the way it is you need to prevent “foreigners” from entering and changing it.

Obviously if Native Americans had better “border security,” the geopolitics of North America would look quite a bit different today.

That’s the world Eilish is suggesting we should have had, though.

She’s not actually saying that “no one is illegal on stolen land.” To the contrary, she’s insinuating that all of us who live in North America now and who aren’t directly descended from the indigenous tribal people of North America are the real “illegals” here.

That’s nonsense for a host of other reasons, of course, but this is such a shit argument and in a lot of ways it’s just a self-own if anyone bothered to think it through for more than a minute.

The loss of tribal cultures in North America is a direct result of people who came from another part of the world with very different values and customs proliferating on this continent in a way that displaced those who were already living here. Certainly throughout the period we’re talking about, it would be impossible to say that European “migration” made the Native people better off or that it was somehow not a massive disruption to their way of life.

But then, the Sioux moving into the Great Plains didn’t do much good for the Crow, Kiowa, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Arikara, Mandan, or Hidatsa people either.

The hypocrisy in Eilish’s statement was called out by the Native America Tongva Tribe, who noted that the singer owns a $3 million property located on their ancestral lands.

If she really believed that she was living on stolen land and that it was rightfully Native American land, she could donate her new estate back to the last tribe that controlled it.

My view is simple:

Violent conquest was the most common and normal process by which nearly *ALL* territory has been acquired throughout human history. You’ll find territorial borders change due to conquest all over every continent humans have ever inhabited.

This only changed after the Enlightenment for, as far as I can tell, a few reasons:

1. The Enlightenment brought with it a significant boost to classical liberal principles like individual (rather than collective) property rights; recognition of individual rights to life and liberty; and a much stronger belief in the dignity of all human beings.
2. With the rise of capitalism coupled with a serious focus on science and empiricism, technological development in Europe rapidly increased and was converted into wealth. With wealth came two things: First, a much greater degree of personal autonomy and ability to slowly negotiate for land instead of the urgency that comes with subsistence… and second, it meant most people had a hell of a lot more to lose in any violent confrontation.

From there, we started rethinking the way that land and resource acquisition / transfers should actually happen.

Of course, this process was and is very slow, and there are still tons of places around the world where instead of respecting other people’s property rights, kleptocrats just roll in with tanks and soldiers and take what they want by force. We’re still at a pretty early stage of social development when you really think about it, and it’s just not the case that everyone agrees with modern liberal sensibilities around who is the “rightful” occupant of any given territory.

It’s not surprising that the indigenous tribes of North and South America got displaced, in the same way that it’s not surprising that the Scottish and Irish got conquered by the Brits or that the Western Saharans are now part of Morocco.

In an ideal world, the only time land would exchange hands would be through peaceful negotiation… but we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a very real and flawed one where stuff I wish happened doesn’t, and stuff I wished never happened frequently does… and there’s very little I can do about any of it.

Consequently, these kinds of things are actually *complicated,* and not easily boiled down to stupid slogans worn by celebrities at fancy galas.