Bryan Fischer spent a good portion of his radio program today voicing his opposition to “amnesty” and any effort to pass immigration reform legislation, at one point going off on an incoherent tangent to complain about the phrase “a nation of immigrants.”
The phrase is generally used to make the point that most American citizens today are descendants of ancestors who immigrated to America in previous generations, but Fischer apparently doesn’t understand that.
“Eighty-five to 87% of the people that live in the United States were born here,” Fischer argued. “You know what that makes us? That makes us native Americans. We are Americans by birth.”
Things then became even more confusing when Fischer began to argue that the Native Americans who inhabited this land when the settlers arrived where themselves immigrants from Eurasia.
“It means that Native American tribes are immigrants too!” Fischer proclaimed. “If we’re a nation of immigrants, to use their expression, that has to apply to the Indian Nations that were here when European settlers arrived. Everybody here is an immigrant. Everybody here is a descendant of those who immigrated to these shores.”
Ummm, yes. That is exactly what the phrase “a nation of immigrants” means.
