Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.

Orben’s line is a pointed one-liner that uses irony to invert a modern political phrase (“illegal aliens”) by applying it to the earliest European settlers. The punchline—“Ask any Indian”—invokes Native Americans as witnesses to colonization, implying that the original “unauthorized entrants” were Europeans who displaced Indigenous peoples. As a piece of political humor, it compresses a critique of American origin myths and of selective moralizing about immigration into a single reversal: the United States’ foundational history complicates claims that immigration problems are new or uniquely contemporary.