This country was founded on forced immigration, capitalism and greed
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." - Donald Trump June 16, 2015
The Colonial Period
In 1615, English courts began to send convicts to the colonies as a way of alleviating England's large criminal population. From nearly the first landing on the American shores up until 1776 and the Revolution, the British first through a black market type system, then by a government sanctioned (Transportation Act of 1718) policy systematically emptied the gaols of 50,000 felons not convicted of what we would now call “high crimes.” Petty theft, prostitution, robbery, arson, and bigamy were offenses that could land you in America the hard way. They filled boats arriving from America with tobacco (imagine the smell) with these convicts destined to serve their sentence in the plantations of Maryland and Virginia. Additionally, and not incidentally, the British also “transported” (that was the official sentence) political prisoners, POWs, and others not committing crimes. Most "historians" in their attempt to rewrite history will make the claim that political prisoners made up the majority of those sentanced to be transported but since the original British records have survived, they show that only about 1000 of them were political dissidents.
As early as 1700, The colonies recognized this was a problem. Massachusetts made the first attempt to shut out bad immigrants. A statute had been made in order to fine shipmasters £5 for every passenger whose name, character, and circumstances they had failed to deliver in writing to the custom-house officer, who was bound to transmit that list to the town clerk. These names were those of prisoners, servants as well as of others. In 1722 this penalty was increased to £100 and other colonies soon followed. Still, this was not enough to deter them and in their attempt to refuse convict ships, Parliament passed the Transportation Act of 1718. This forced them to take the prisoners Most of these convicts landed and were settled along the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. Although many were unskilled and thus put to work in agriculture, particularly tobacco production, others with skills were sold to tradesmen, shipbuilders, and iron manufacturers, and for other similar occupations. Convict laborers could be purchased for a lower price than indentured white or enslaved African laborers, and because they already existed outside society's rules, they could be more easily exploited. The typical sentence were between 7 and 14 years. Virginia and the colonies tried repeatedly to pass laws preventing England from sending convicts, though those laws were overturned by the Crown and the practice continued until 1776. The convicts were then shipped to Australia and the joke about Australia being founded by criminals was born.
Indentured servants first arrived in America in the decade following the settlement of Jamestown by the Virginia Company in 1607. Indentured servants were immigrants who could not afford the costs involved in travelling to the colonies. These adult immigrants signed an indenture contract whereby they agreed to work four to seven years in exchange for passage and a freedom package or "dues" although children sometimes for much longer. Their freedom package may have included land, a year's worth of corn, arms, a cow and new clothes although many never recieved this. Most working in the colony's tobacco fields. 80% of the immigrants coming to the Chesapeake region during the 17th century were indentured servants and were the primary source of labor. While the life of an indentured servant was harsh and restrictive, it wasn't slavery. There were laws that protected some of their rights. But their life was not an easy one, and the punishments for people who wronged were harsher than those for non-servants. An indentured servant's contract could be extended as punishment for breaking any rules, such as running away, or in the case of female servants, becoming pregnant.
The headright system was originally created in 1618 in Jamestown, Virginia. Incentives were offered to settlers to buy indentured servants and increase the labor supply of these colonies. It granted 50 acres of land to a planter for every individual that was brought to the colonies in that person's name. Plantation owners benefited greatly from the headright system and many families grew in power and wealth almost overnight. One landowner purchased 60 slervants and received 3,000 acres of land in 1638. Even if the indentured servant did not make it to Virginia alive, the sponsor still received land. It was reported that kidnappings regularly took place in order to fill the ships.
As demands for labor grew, so did the cost of indentured servants. Many landowners also felt threatened by newly freed servants demand for land. The colonial elite realized the problems and cost of indentured servitude and turned to African slaves as a more profitable and ever-renewable source of labor and the shift from indentured servants to racial slavery had begun. In 1619 the first black Africans came to Virginia. With no slave laws in place, they were initially treated as indentured servants, and given the same opportunities for freedom dues as whites. However, slave laws were soon passed in Massachusetts in 1641 and Virginia in 1661 and any small freedoms that might have existed for blacks were taken away. Although indentured service of the colonial genre ceased after the American Revolution, similar kinds of contract labor were widespread in the United States during periods of labor shortage until the passage of the Contract Labor Law of 1885.
Europeans didn’t just displace Native Americans—they enslaved them, and encouraged tribes to participate in the slave trade. In 1633 the English Puritan settlements at Plimoth and the Massachusetts Bay Colonies had begun expanding into the rich Connecticut River Valley to accommodate the steady stream of new emigrants from England. Other than the hardship of the journey and the difficulty of building homes in what the Puritans considered a wilderness, only one major obstacle threatened the security of the expanding settlements: the Pequots. In 1637 the Pequots lost a war with the English who enslaved Indians they took captive. The Pequots resisted enslavement, however, and frustrated that the Indians would "not endure the yoke," the Puritans sent many of them to Bermuda in exchange for African slaves.
Between the years 1607 and 1775, the colonies were settled by 217,900 free immigrants, 311,600 negro slaves, 54,500 convicts and 200,200 indentured servants.
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/...Colonies*.html
http://genealogydecoded.com/2013/07/...-bibliography/
https://archive.org/stream/actsresol...1mass_djvu.txt
http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/...onial_Virginia
https://clmroots.blogspot.com/2016/0...d-servant.html
http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetect...nts-in-the-us/
http://www.umbc.edu/che/tahlessons/p...udent:RS07.pdf
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