In the midst of the riots that have raged across Los Angeles in response to the Trump administration’s raid to apprehend criminals, Mexican flags have emerged as a prominent emblem of the rioters’ lawless defiance.

While the New York Times gushed that the rioters’ usage of the flag represented “pride in their heritage,” most Americans saw it for what it was: a symbol of conquest. But many leftists are now making that very argument, that it represents a reclamation by Mexico of land supposedly “stolen” by the United States.

This week, Gerardo Fernández Noroña, the president of the Mexican Senate, adopted that argument and ran with it. Smugly describing a visit to Trump Tower in early 2017, just before Trump took office for his first term, Noroña said, “I was at Trump Tower, 16 days before President-elect Trump took office for the first time. I said, ‘Sure, we’ll build the wall and we’ll pay for it, but we’ll do it according to the map of Mexico in 1830.'”

He then held up a map printout of what is today the lower 48 states, showing the borders in 1830. Mexico controlled what is modern California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, parts of Colorado, and Texas before the Texas Revolution in 1836 and the conclusion of the Mexican-American War in 1848. After the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, all of that land became part of the U.S.

“We were dispossessed of those territories, we were settled there before the nation now known as the United States. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo established rights for the people settled in those territories that were not respected,” Noroña continued. “With this geography, how can the U.S. talk about liberating Los Angeles and California? Liberate them from whom? The Mexicans who are settled there are settled in what’s always been their homeland.”

At the very end of his diatribe, Noroña threw in the platitude that “of course” this land now belongs to the United States, but his meaning was clear: Mexicans still see that land as rightfully theirs, and they have the right to take it back through mass migration.

Now, that argument has popped up everywhere from the streets of L.A. to CNN’s newsroom to Katy Perry’s Instagram page.

At its heart, this argument is just a regurgitation of the cliché “stolen land” refrain carted out by American Indians and their white guilt-ridden allies to try to shame modern-day Americans for the supposed sins of their ancestors. There are two primary reasons why Mexico and the Mexican people have absolutely no claim to California or any other square foot of sovereign American soil.

First, Mexicans made up only a fraction of the population of what is today the Southwest.

In the 1820s, the non-Indian population of Alta California, which included California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, stood at barely 3,000 people. Similarly, only about 5,000 Mexicans lived in Texas in 1830. For comparison, Mexico as a whole had a population of somewhere between 6 and 8 million people in 1830. A tiny fraction of the total population living in an area does not denote a “homeland” by any stretch of the term.

The American Southwest, including California, was not an integral part of Mexico in 1848 and hadn’t been at any time previously. In reality, it was a borderland where any governmental control was tenuous at best and where U.S. and Mexican settlers and authorities jockeyed for advantage. They also both contended with the Indians, who made up the vast majority of the population.

Second, California ceased to be part of any supposed Mexican “homeland” the instant Mexico lost the Mexican-American War in 1848.

This particular video posted on X claims to show how a large swathe of what is today the United States used to belong to Mexico and was stolen by the greedy U.S.

Videos like this one have been rightly mocked because, if its logic is accepted, every nation on Earth would spiral into endless rounds of grievance-based reparations. Mexico used to control the Southwest, but who owned it before that? Spain. And who owned Spain before it became the country we know today? A succession of Arabs, Germanic peoples, the Romans, the Carthaginians, and Celt-Iberian tribes. Tracing back who “originally” settled there or who the “rightful” owners are is a pointless exercise that can only be used as a cynical political cudgel by resentful, aggrieved people to try to gain an advantage over more conscientious citizens.

The operative words in that X post are “used to.” It doesn’t matter who used to own it, because we own it now and have the power to defend it from those who would take it from us. The previous owners do not have a rightful claim.

With Mexico’s history of political instability, it was never going to be able to develop and bring order to its northern territories (it still can’t with the ones we let them keep). The United States did.

There are consequences to losing wars, and Mexico learned that the hard way in 1848. California ceased to be a part of Mexico legally and morally as soon as the ink dried on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. That land became part of the United States at that instant, and it will still be ours unless it is taken by or sold to another power. This has been the standard for land transfers throughout history. But now cynical leftists and avaricious illegal aliens believe they can prey upon Americans’ sense of guilt about how their forefathers civilized this continent.

Videos showing (presumably) illegal aliens hoisting the Mexican flag up at construction sites around the country as a display of solidarity should leave no doubt in anyone’s mind this invasion aims at conquest. The only pertinent issue at hand is whether the U.S. will, 177 years later, win the war against this invasion and keep what is rightfully ours.