Carlos Santana's critique of nativist ecology targets something harder to see than a wrong conclusion: a wrong framing. Nativism in ecology — the assumption that species are “from” somewhere and that being from that place gives them a legitimate role in its ecosystem — is not a factual claim that can be directly tested. It is a framework assumption that shapes which questions get asked, which data get collected, and which conclusions get drawn.
The assumption is this: organisms that evolved in a given ecosystem are adapted to it, and organisms that arrived recently are disruptive. Native species belong; invasive species don't. Conservation should preserve native assemblages and remove non-native ones.
Santana's argument is not that invasive species are harmless. Some are catastrophically destructive — island birds driven to extinction by introduced predators, forests consumed by imported pathogens. The argument is that the framework conflates origin with function. A species' ecological role — what it eats, what eats it, what habitat it creates or destroys — is not determined by where it evolved. It is determined by what it does. And what a species does in a given ecosystem depends on the ecosystem's current state, which includes all the other species present, including the recently arrived ones.
The framework becomes invisible because it is built into the vocabulary. “Native” and “invasive” are descriptive terms that carry normative weight. Calling a species invasive frames its presence as a problem before any ecological analysis has been done. The framing determines the research agenda: studies of invasive species overwhelmingly measure harm, not benefit, because the category “invasive” already implies harm. This is not bias in individual researchers. It is a structural feature of the conceptual framework.
The practical consequence is that conservation resources are sometimes spent removing species that are performing useful ecological functions — pollination, seed dispersal, prey for native predators — because they are categorized as non-native. The ecological analysis (what is this species doing?) is overridden by the categorical judgment (this species doesn't belong here). When the framework and the ecology conflict, the framework wins, because the framework determines what counts as evidence.
The deeper point is about how scientific frameworks constrain discovery. A framework doesn't just organize existing knowledge — it determines what new knowledge is visible. If your framework says native species are important and invasive species are problems, you will study native species' ecological roles and invasive species' ecological damage. You will not study invasive species' ecological roles or native species' ecological damage, because those questions don't arise naturally within the framework. The framework makes certain questions invisible, and invisible questions don't get answered.