[Shomer]

Has anyone ever stopped for a moment and wondered why there was no such thing as an "illegal alien" in Biblical times?

I'm going to plead ignorance of the laws of the ancient world yet there are at least two reasons why I think that the various societies were concerned about "aliens"

(1) They built expensive walls around their cities

(2) And if one wants to get "Biblical" about it, think real hard about the point and purpose of the event at Babel. We can speculate all day on specifically why there was the dividing of men into separate and distinct nations, but with the abundance of empirical evidence the fact is clear there is such a thing as Divine Apartheid. I submit that no matter how much the misotheists wish to social engineer an anti-Babel system, the nations will always be suspicious if not down-right hostile to "foreigners". Xenophobia is as old as Babel and will be with us (at least in its secular sense) until the 2nd Coming.

[Alberta's Child]

The term "illegal alien" didn't exist in the U.S. until the early decades of the 20th century. Before that, there wasn't much of anything in terms of immigration laws in the U.S. The country still had a frontier and was still being settled, and there was nothing that distinguished "legal" from "illegal" immigrants.

Nobody really cared very much about "illegal immigration" back then, for the same reason that "illegal aliens" didn't exist in Biblical times. In both cases the government had very few functions, and providing "free" sh!t like medical care, education, housing, etc. certainly wasn't one of them. The American who settled in the Dakota Territory in the latter half of the 19th century was no different than the German immigrant who lived across the road . . . they both worked from dawn to dusk every day, and neither one of them had any claim on the fruits of the other one's labors. The German immigrant was there for the same reason that the American was there. And the same was true for fishermen, shepherds, and merchants in Judea back when Christ walked on the earth.

When government served minimal functions, there was no reason for a person to immigrate to the U.S. for financial reasons other than what could be gained from the freedom to derive financial gain from his own labor. This all came to an end in the United States when government became nothing more than a massive industry hell-bent on enriching some people at the expense of others.

As I've said here before on any number of occasions . . . illegal immigrants are not a "problem" for this country because they represent a drain on our schools, hospitals, etc. The real problem is that these public institutions ever existed in the first place.