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Because thier family and bloodline built the country.
I'm not being hyperbolic, or trying to invoke some sort of higher power or ethos or shared culture, like everyone else. It's just being sensible; People whom have family in America that can trace thier linieage back decades, if not centuries, are looking at a line of people who's decisions and choices and goals have had a massive knock-on secondary effects that have effected the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of others, and so on, and they in-turn been affected by others.
The son who's great-grand father ran for mayor in a town can track down the laws and see what long-term effects they had on it's development. The daughter who's great-great-great grandmother rescued a dying man from the battlefield and hid him from Johnny Reb of the devils in blue and married him, or just nursed him back to health and he went on to kill others. The grandfather that pushed for the first major business in a town, thereby changing the lives of hundreds directly, or the grandmother that pushed for them to head out west on Route 66 to pursue for better fortune elsewhere. The northen carpet-bagger that came down to the South and is the direct reason why parts of the Atlas V rocket and Space Shuttle were built in New Orleans.
(That last one is completely true, by the by. The others are generalities.)
You are presumably sitting in the results of those actions, piled on and on and on by what I would charitably call a unique group of individuals. I doubt the Earth could handle a second America lurking in the wings. We'd probably explode. Possibly literally.
Put another way, looking at it from a business perspective, if you have a buisness with a public IPO and you then conclude 'And those with the smallest shares will have identical voting power as to those with the most', they'd look at you as if you'd lost your goddamn mind.
So that's one arguement.
'But Eyes,' you might reply. 'That's begining to look suspiciously akin to what alot of Europeans refer to Class and Nobility and Lineage and whatnot. Aren't Americans virulently allergic to that?'
And I would reply, 'Why, yes. Yes it is. So I think it would be wise to look at the circumstances and reasons for such a thought to arise and perhaps correct the reason for it.'
But perhaps you're not convinced. Understandable. As they say, you don't pin others medals on your chest.
Though I wonder, sometimes. That blood tells, more than often, that we really are the results of our forefathers than we care to admit.
So! Second arguement.
Let's look at context.
I think it's fair to say that the majority of immigrants to America, up to a certain point, were what we would call settlers. People who risked it all - quite literally - to establish a better life. People with a certain attitude and grit whom were willing to wrestle civilization out of a land that, quite charitably, wanted to kill them, populated by potentially hostile locals that also wanted to kill them and each other, if not both, depending on thier mood. That there was, if you will, a certain gate they had to pass through, be it either via travel or sheer survival or grit or luck or all of the above to become the successful American Experiment.
Nor should we ignore that alot of people - especially during the early 20th century, in the period between 1900-1920 - flooded into the country, and if they could not sucede one way or another, they actually went back. 'Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor' is just really good propaganda tacked on way after the fact, that even after a large amount of threat had been wrested from the North American continent, there was still challenges to overcome. Modern infrastructure still hadn't been built, and in some places I know of, cities that are now seperated by a mere hour or so could take days to reach, because even up to WW2 there were still portions of America that, yes, really were still wild.
Times have changed. The people coming in now are not coming in to settle. They are not coming in to travel by train or horse or car to remote places to find a quite nest to live out their lives away from everyone else. Why they are coming can be interpreted in as many ways as you like, from the charitable to the uncharitable to the actively hostile, but the idea that people coming now, today, are similar in any way to the people coming to America pre-WW2(and I'm being generous with that for a reason) is utterly ludicrous.
If you wanted me to nail down a cut-off date, if I were feeling cheeky, I'd say 1965 for the Hart Cellar Act. But, no. Realistically, I'd say January 3rd, 1959. Why?
Because that was when Alaska was incorporated as a state. The last of the great frontiers, finally civilized.
No more lands left to conquer.
Look. I'm not going to sit here and say that I agree with the idea of Heritage Americans unequivocally. Though lord knows the past ten years are so have been rather testing for some of my previously held beleifs, so who the hell knows by this point.
But I do think it's silly to completely ignore all the above. Times have changed. The world as a whole is different. We need to adapt to that. How we adapt to that is an open question, yes, but I think it's fair to say that we have a slight problem that needs to get resolved, hopefully in a peaceable manner.
Fair disclaimer: The above was written while sleep deprived, with no references, and primarily because my brain would not shut the ever-loving hell up and I finally gave up and decided to put all this to paper. Maybe now I can crawl off and get some goddamn sleep.
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