“The sad little lizard said he was a Tyrannosaurus Rex on his mother’s side.”

A lot of people say they are descended from kings and other great notables.

Actually, they’re probably right. It’s a matter of arithmetic. If you say you are descended from King Richard of the Lion Heart, you are going back seven hundred years. That’s over twenty generations.

You had two parents, four great grandparents, eight great-grandparents and sixteen great great grandparents. And that’s only going back four generations. If you go back twenty generations, you have a million direct ancestors. So there are a lot of kings and earls back there, if on the bar sinister if nothing else.

I talk about the Reverend Alexander Whitaker at Jamestown. He had no children, but his brother Jabez was one of my thousand direct ancestors ten generations ago.

But I have the name, so I claim the fame. I talk about the Reverend Alexander because he makes such important points about Southern history. He wrote the first book in English written in America, baptized Pocahontas, and did a lot of other things. My point is that he did all that and he died BEFORE the Mayflower got to America.

So now you can see how important this generational arithmetic is. You are descended from kings.

But population arithmetic is essential to understanding history. If you understand basic arithmetic, you understand how ridiculous this whole business of “a nation of immigrants” is.

Adam Smith wrote his book The Wealth of Nations in 1776. In that book he said that Americans had huge families. He said that the American population doubled by natural increase every twenty to twenty-five years.

Do the math. Jamestown was founded in 1607. If the American population doubled every twenty to twenty-five years, a hundred people in Jamestown would have multiplied to five or ten thousand people by 1776.

Most people seem to think there were a lot of immigrants in America when the Constitution was written. As a matter of fact, when the Constitution was written in 1787, America’s white population had a higher percentage of native-born Americans than it has ever had.

There was wave after wave of immigration to America in the 1600’s. Germans poured into the mountains of North Carolina, including my Snyder ancestors. Thousands of Puritans moved into New England. Thousands of Huguenots and Scots and Germans went to South Carolina.

But the huge waves of immigrants ended about 1710. By the time Constitution was written, even the last wave had multiplied at least eight times. Earlier immigrants had multiplied a hundred times, and all those hundreds of thousands were native-born white Americans. By 1789 almost all Americans came from families who had been born here for over a century.

It is a matter of simple arithmetic. When the Constitution talked about “We the People of the United States and OUR posterity” it did NOT mean a nation of immigrants. A person whose family has been born in America for over a century no more thinks of himself as an immigrant than an American Indian does.

We welcomed immigrants, but we didn’t HAVE to. Back then immigrants had a lot of the talents we needed and we were glad to have them. But that was for the good of ourselves and our posterity, not because we were a bunch of immigrants ourselves.

“We the People of the United States of America and OUR posterity” says nothing about immigrants automatically having rights under the Constitution. Only the immigrants who were good for ourselves and our posterity were welcome.

And “We the people of the United States and OUR posterity” certainly gives no rights whatsoever to ILLEGAL immigrants. In fact, the Founding Fathers attitude to immigrants is best expressed by the MEXICAN Constitution.

This is what the MEXICAN Constitution says about immigrants, both legal and illegal (my translation):

“If Mexican authorities determine that the residence of a non-Mexican is NOT ADVANTAGEOUS to Mexico, that person WILL be compelled to leave Mexico immediately.”

No hearings. No appeals. Mexico is for Mexicans.

Any native-born American who says this is a nation of immigrants is giving away his birthright.

Any Hispanic who votes for illegal immigrants over American citizens is not an American, no matter where he was born.