Few political arguments are repeated more often in debates about illegal immigration than the claim that “they were here first.”  It’s a powerful line because it is simple, memorable, and emotionally satisfying.  It also compresses nearly two thousand years of history into a slogan.

The story usually goes something like this: the Aztecs possessed the Southwest, Spain took it, Mexico inherited it, and the United States stole it.  It’s a neat narrative.  The problem is that the historical record tells a very different story.

I’ve written on this matter before, but I didn’t go back far enough in history to prove my point.  So, today I thought we might examine the issue by rolling back the calendar—not to the Mexican American War, not to Mexican independence, but all the way back to the time of Christ.

When Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth, neither Mexico nor the American Southwest were a part of anything resembling a unified nation-state.  What existed between the time of Christ and Columbus’ arrival in the New World were as man as forty independently developing civilizations.

Meanwhile, the word “Mexican” derives from Mexica (pronounced meh-SHEE-kah), the name the Aztecs called themselves.  That name remained associated with the region around the Aztec capital in central Mexico and that never extended into what is the modern American Southwest, and area. that was home to a succession of Indigenous cultures, i.e.,  the Puebloans, Hohokam, Mogollon, Apache & Navajo.  Each of these civilizations developed independently and control of the region shifted among these distinct societies with their own histories and culture.

The Spanish arrived in the early sixteenth century and gradually established sovereignty over much of the region for nearly three centuries before Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821 and inherited the territory.  Mexico then controlled the region from 1821 until 1848—a period of just twenty-seven years.  But even then, the region remained loosely governed if at all.  Historians estimate about 15,000 non-Indigenous residents lived in the area spanning 1.3 million square miles stretching from Texas to California and northward to Oregon.

By the time the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican American War in 1848, the region averaged roughly one Mexican citizen for every 100 square miles with the principal settlements between present-day Arizona and Oregon separated by more than 800 miles.  To truly appreciate how sparsely populated the region was, imagine a territory larger than Alaska with a population smaller than many modern suburban neighborhoods.

Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded the territory to the United States in exchange for $15 million; however, the U.S. also assumed millions of dollars in claims owed by the new Mexican government.  And whatever one’s opinion of the war or the exchange, the transfer of sovereignty occurred through a treaty recognized under international law.

Yet today we still hear the argument that Mexico possesses some special claim to the Southwest because “they were here first.”  The problem with that statement should be evident – it conflates several entirely different civilizations and timelines into one continuous narrative.

The people who inhabited the Southwest before the arrival of the Spanish were not Mexicans. They were Indigenous peoples with distinct cultures, languages, and histories. The Aztecs were not the Hohokam. The Hohokam were not the Navajo. The Navajo were not the Pueblo peoples.  Each occupied different places, in history.

Arguing that Mexico retains a special claim to the Southwest is no more persuasive than claiming France retains a claim to the Louisiana Purchase, that Russia retains a claim to Alaska, or that Spain retains a claim to Florida.

Human history is a story of migration, settlement, and political change.  If being somewhere first were the sole determinant of legitimacy, every nation on earth would be vulnerable to competing historical claims stretching back millennia.

Time has a way of compressing history into simple narratives, making brief periods of control appear more consequential than they actually were. The phrase “they were here first” oversimplifies a far more complex reality by collapsing centuries of separate peoples, cultures, and political identities into a single continuous story that never actually existed.

History cannot be reduced to an ideological slogan, and this much is certain:

• Mexico took its name from the Aztec Empire
• the Aztecs never occupied what is now the American Southwest,
• Mexico as a nation governed the area for just 27 of the last 2,000 years, and
• the region became part of the United States through a treaty recognized under international law.

Whatever one’s views on immigration policy today, the contention that Mexico possesses a unique claim to the Southwest because “they were here first” is less a statement of history than an expression of political ideology, plain and simple.