Fallacious?

There’s just something fallacious to me about the statement “no person is illegal on stolen land” and the way in which it’s used in political discourse. I feel like I know but I’m curious what everyone else thinks. 

Since I did not answer this last time, I will take a crack at it.

To me, this is either a law that is true or false. It is clearly false - at least here in the United States.

Now, we can rephrase this to be "No person should be called 'illegal' since we are all on stolen land". This is an opinion and perhaps can be made into an argument, but as it stands, I don't see any fallacies. I do see some challenges with the reasoning behind this:

1) What is "stolen land"? Civilizations are created from non-stop wars where land is taken over and people displaced or outright killed. We likely only have a fraction of written records as to where and when this happened, but given humanity has been around for about 250k years, I imagine not a single person on earth has not benefited from some aggressive land-grab by ancestors.

It has been argued that this "stolen land" concept only applies to that which can be tracked today where the people who are the victims are still around, feeling the effects. Fair enough, but this doesn't change the fact that the modern victims likely also were beneficiaries of the same crimes for which they are victims today... and that we will someday be the victims.

2) What does this mean exactly? That anyone can live in the US from anywhere - no restrictions? Clearly this is a horrible policy and the consequences can easily be foreseen to be disastrous.

At best this general idea can be made more specific and less "sound bite-y" to become a workable policy and/or philosophical/political stance. Perhaps something like "Populations that were displaced by traceable, historical land-grabs that would be seen as illegal or even just immoral today, should be granted full citizenship if they request it."

Personally, I think no person should be called "illegal" simply for the dehumanizing effects. This is a psychological technique used to remove human empathy people would otherwise feel for this group. In terms of legal status, I would have to leave that up to the politicians to come up with a workable policy that takes into account the ethical and moral factors so often left out of these policies.

Yes, there is a fallacy in “No person is illegal on stolen land.”

First is the category mistake and fallacy of equivocation: The statement conflates moral and historical claims (“for example, this statement usually means the land was stolen from Indigenous peoples”) with legal immigration status (the statutory definition of “illegal immigrant”).

Next is the fallacy of non sequitur. Even if the original acquisition of land was unjust, it does not logically follow that present-day immigration laws are nullified or that individuals cannot be classified as “illegal” under those laws. A person illegally within any jurisdiction is an illegal.

Of course, we can’t leave the discussion with mentioning the Fallacy of Appeal to Emotion. The phrasing is rhetorically powerful but substitutes indignation for argument, leveraging and alleging a historical injustice to dismiss present legal frameworks without actually addressing them.

The statement illustrates that the speaker is not aware of the difference between “Stolen Land” and the “Right of Conquest.”

Stolen Land is an illegitimate seizure — wrongful taking of property against established norms (theft, dispossession, or bad-faith treaties).

The Right of Conquest is an international law concept that allows territory to be acquired through military victory, followed by effective control and recognition by other states. While morally contested, conquest was treated as a lawful transfer of sovereignty at the time. This changed somewhat in the mid-20th century.

The original statement treats all conquest as “theft,” ignoring the legal distinction that conquest was historically normalized and recognized, whereas theft implies continuing illegitimacy.

This brings me to the generally accepted legal definition of ownership, which is the exclusive right to possess, use, and dispose of property, subject only to law. An interesting twist to this is that a possessor is entitled to possession against all except a person with a better title, which takes us too far afield from the question presented.