Look, borders are one of the issues where I am at my most rabidly libertarian, and this stuff will cease to mystify you if you join me over here. For example:
In this view, physical presence in a territory allows someone to exercise power.
I think this is straightforwardly wrong, at least here in the US, and my exhibit A would be the Supreme Court decision "City of Grant's Pass v. Johnson"
The really, really brief capsule of that decision is that Grant's Pass, here in Oregon, criminalized public camping. The controlling circuit court decided that, since Grant's Pass did not have any homeless shelters, this meant that there was a class of people who were legally prohibited from sleeping anywhere in Grant's Pass, and that essentially this was an illegal attempt to punish people merely for belonging to the class of homeless people.
The Supreme Court pulled an Anatole France, explaining that since the law of Grant's Pass, in its majestic equality, prohibited both rich and poor alike from sleeping in public parks, this was not illegal discrimination against the homeless.
For these purposes, the takeaway is this:
It is entirely possible to be a citizen of the US and for it to be illegal for you to actually reside in any specific place within the US.
Being a citizen of a country is not like owning a piece of property. Yes, as a citizen I have some influence on how public land is used through the institutions of representative democracy, but if I become homeless that doesn't mean they'll let me live in the public park.
That's why I push back so hard against @isaacsapphire 's analogy above:
In that analogy, a person here on a temporary work visa, who cannot vote, who can easily be expelled from the country by the bureacracy, and who rents his living space from somebody else, that guy is one of the people who lives in the house.
A Native American citizen, one who can certainly vote, and one, say, who owns property and a business, is, in this analogy, the homeless person who exerts no control over the house.
And so our analogy has drifted so far off from actual reality that even answering the question tells us nothing about the thing we're trying to illuminate.
Is this a criticism of naive landback and decolonization rhetoric? Yes, it absolutely is.
My being an American Citizen is not the same as my owning land, and trying to reduce it down to such a thing will just confuse us.
A better simplification, in my opinion, is that my citizenship, and migration in general, are about which economies I am allowed to participate in.
This stuff is only mystifying if you force yourself to forget about some very basic economic principles, in particular the fact that both labor and capital have a vested interest in being able to move freely.
When you sell in a market, you want to go to a place where there is high demand for what you are selling and low supply, because then you get to charge more for what you are selling.
The danger and tragedy of market economics are that my personal incentive is to find a place where there is high demand for my services, set up shop, and then prevent new people from entering the market, therefore keeping supply low relative to demand and allowing me to jack up my prices.
But of course, if I do this, I am standing in the way of the ways that markets improve the lot of mankind.
There's a story about this lower down on my blog, but suppose I am a Doctor from a foreign country with a fairly rare specialty.
Perhaps I might want to practice my specialty in the rural united states; it might be that I earn less there then Doctors in the big city, but far more than I would earn in my home country. In fact, if there's enough difference between what I can earn in the US and my home country, I might be willing to undercut native-born doctors on my salary asks and still consider myself to be really well off.
So patients in this rural area have more access to medical specialty at a lower cost. Hospitals can pay lower wages. US Doctors are annoyed because the increased supply of doctors means that they have to compete more by possibly accepting lower salaries for their labor.
But like, who is the "ruling class" here? Have native-born patients in this scenario somehow had their power diluted through, uh... the ability to purchase a service they need at a lower cost than they would otherwise be charged?
I'm skeptical about that last one really being a loss of power.
All of this stuff becomes far less mystifying once you actually understand it as being heavily related to economic participation.
To go back to "How do you square landback reforms and pro-immigration stance?"
The answer is that you find a way to believe that most Native Americans AND most immigrants have been unfairly excluded from full participation in the American economy. There's a bunch of lenses you can use to reach that conclusion, I don't think it is really a particularly out there idea.
And again, if I'm a Native American who owns an apartment building, who is better for my power: A green card holder who pays rent on time every month, or a native-born citizen who doesn't?
