America is not owned by Americans and their children but is instead held by people all over the globe, according to a statement from amnesty advocate Sen. Lindsey Graham.

“I’ve always believed that America is an idea [which is] not defined by its people but by its ideals,” Graham said in a press statement January 12 which sought to criticise President Donald Trump for describing some foreign countries as less pleasant than America, or as “shitholes.”

Graham continued:

The American ideal is embraced by people all over the globe.  It was best said a long time ago, E Pluribus Unum – Out of Many, One. Diversity has always been our strength, not our weakness.  In reforming immigration we cannot lose these American Ideals.

Graham was a founding member of the 2013 “Gang of Eight” pro-amnesty group and has frequently urged the importation of more cheap labor for his home-state companies.

His view of Americans’ homeland as the shared property of the world is shared by many other pro-immigration advocates. For example, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is working with Graham to push the amnesty bill, said in December:

America is a land of immigrants — it is who we are … that is why I have consistently supported humane and comprehensive immigration law reform, and it is why I am a proud co-sponsor of the DREAM Act.

In 2014, President Barack Obama voiced a similar claim, telling his audience that Americans do not have the right to exclude migrants:

Sometimes we get attached to our particular tribe, our particular race, our particular religion, and then we start treating other folks differently.

And that, sometimes, has been a bottleneck to how we think about immigration.  If you look at the history of immigration in this country, each successive wave, there have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, well, I don’t want those folks.  Even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans.

Business elites also use the ideal of immigration to shake off the civic demands from their fellow citizens — and also to cut payroll costs, increase sales, grow profits and spike the value of real-estate.

On January 12, for example, shortly after Democrats leaked Trump’s description of some foreign countries as “shitholes” — Goldman Sachs’s CEO used Twitter to declare that Americans’ prime directive is acceptance of foreign immigrants.

The D.C.-based head of Mark Zuckerberg’s cheap-labor lobby, FWD.us, also insists that America is home to anyone who gets through the border.

In contrast, President Donald Trump won the 2016 election because voters shared his frequently expressed favoritism towards his own country and his fellow citizens. In his inauguration speech, Trump declared:

This is your day. This is your celebration. And this, the United States of America, is your country. What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people. January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.

The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before.

At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens. Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public.

In his pro-immigration statement, Graham also argued that government-imposed civic variety — “diversity” — is an American ideal that is ensured by mass-immigration.