Excerpts from Unguarded Gates -
A History of America's Immigration Crisis
by Otis L. Graham, Jr.

Chapter 1: Nation of the Native Born Unready for the Great Wave

It is not clear who invented the phrase "America is a nation of immigrants," but this now-hackneyed thought is not true for any of our national history and applies only in the British colonies for the first few decades in the first half of the seventeenth century. Thereafter, most Americans (by which we mean North Americans in the territory now the United States) were native-born, and that has remained true for the rest of our history to this date. America is a nation of the native-born. But it is certainly true, as historian Victor Greene observed, that "the immigration stamp is upon us," in that we are all descendants of immigrants, even if quite distantly.

Whatever else this implies, our history tells us that immigration in the American story has always, from first to last and at every point, been controversial among the people who live here-associated always with both costs and benefits. This reality has been lost in the current romanticized historical view that immigration is always a Good Thing, both for host society and immigrants. This was not the view of the first human residents of the Americas, the indigenous peoples in this hemisphere when European explorers and immigrants began to arrive. For native populations, European immigration meant death by disease, warfare, and social disorganization, a virtual genocide in which their populations fell 90 percent by 1600. In North America, an Amerindian population estimated at 2 to 20 million (a range lately narrowed among most anthropologists to 4 to 7 million, though there are fierce disagreements) had dropped to perhaps 250,000 when the twentieth century opened. This is the primal American experience with immigration grotesquely negative, unique, and (we fervently hope) unrepeatable. Yet it should anchor our understanding that immigration is morally complicated, immensely powerful in charting human destiny, and always a shifting mixture of goods and bads. That is why nations create immigration policies, hoping to minimize the latter and maximize the former.

When these death-bringing European immigrants became Americans by birth, their own response to further immigration was ambivalent. Industrious immigrants were indispensable in expanding colonial populations, and they were welcomed in the abstract and usually on arrival. But the quality of immigrants from the Old World was a constant issue of concern. "Slums and alleys were raked for labor to stock the plantations," wrote historian Marion Bennett; dependent kinfolk were sometimes dumped on ships headed for America, and the British government was notorious for shipping felons to the southern colonies especially. Colonial assemblies enacted restrictions against paupers "likely to become a public charge" and criminal immigrants as early as 1639, and restrictions on the admission of those "lame, impotent, or infirm" followed.

Independence placed such decisions firmly in American hands. The Founders welcomed immigration in principle, while having serious reservations about its capacity for harm to the fledgling nation. George Washington wrote to a group of Irish immigrants that "the bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations." On another occasion he spoke of his hopes that "the poor, the needy and oppressed of the Earth" would "resort to the fertile plains of our western country" where of course he was a landowner. But he often was of a different mind. "I have no intention to invite immigrants, even if there are no restrictive acts against it. I am opposed to it altogether," he wrote to a friend in England. To John Adams he wrote: "My opinion with respect to immigration is, that except of useful mechanics and some particular description of men and professions, there is no use of encouragement."

Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia raised fundamental questions about populating the country by immigration. Natural population increase would provide Virginia with four and a half million (which he thought a maximum population for the state, and possibly too large a number) in eighty-two years, so there seemed no need to accelerate that growth by "the importation of foreigners." And there would be "inconveniences to be thrown into the scale" if immigration were the path chosen. "It is for the happiness of those united in society to harmonize as much as possible" in matters of civil government but immigrants could be expected to come henceforth mostly from countries of absolute monarchy, bringing habits and outlooks rendering our polity "a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass." A few "useful artificers" might "teach us something we do not know," but the drafter of the Declaration of Independence specifically discouraged building the future nation out of immigration. Hamilton, this time, agreed with his political rival: "The opinion advanced in [Thomas Jefferson's] Notes On Virginia is undoubtedly correct.... The influx of foreigners must ... tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit ... to introduce foreign propensities."

These sentiments were widely shared, from Jefferson to Hamilton across the political spectrum, and do not reflect a divided mind but rather a principled ambivalence. The generation of the Founders expected immigrants to help populate the vast country and welcomed those who shared the American work ethic and would adopt our national values and customs. They had continuing concerns about the habits, particularly the language, political principles, and morals, of those stepping off the boats and repeatedly made it clear that some people would be unwelcome. How to guarantee the immigration of only what James Madison called "foreigners of merit and republican principles" but not "the common class of vagrants, paupers and other outcasts of Europe" according to Congressman James Jackson of Georgia. Policymakers expressed such worries without devising an effective filter against bad immigration-since immigration levels were quite low. The young republic was essentially open to immigrants joining the earlier settlers.