Everyone Here Is Temporary

(A Note on Legality, for the Record)

There is a comforting lie at the center of modern legality:
that some people arrived properly, and others did not.

This lie depends on forgetting when the clock was started.

If you rewind far enough—and history insists that you do—only one group arrives without paperwork: the people who were already here. Everyone else comes by boat, by chain, by gun, by hunger, by hope, by accident, or by nowhere-else-to-go.

Legality, then, is not a moral inheritance.
It is a receipt issued after the transaction.

What we call “illegal” is simply arrival that happened after the doors were locked—by the same people who came in through broken windows and now pretend they were always inside.

If the rule were honest, it would apply to everyone.
If the rule were moral, it would admit its own origins.
But it does neither.

So the system does what systems always do when they’re embarrassed:
it looks down instead of back.

This isn’t about borders.
It’s about memory.

A society that treats history like a starting gun will always mistake survival for crime.
And a nation that calls its own beginning legal is not enforcing law.

It’s enforcing amnesia.