As news reports proliferate of multimillion-dollar — and possibly billion-dollar — fraudulent diversions of government funds involving Minnesota’s Somali immigrant community, it may be time at one year’s end and the next one’s beginning to take a longer look at America’s experience with immigration, and to seek the guidance of the first and one of its two greatest presidents.
The Founding Fathers were aware that their new nation was gifted with vast acreage, but only 4 million people were counted in the first decennial Census in 1790. The Constitution’s first words, drafted by the gifted wordsmith Gouverneur Morris, stated that its authority came from “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common Defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
There is a tension in these words: the new federal government is designed to guarantee liberty but also to “insure” tranquility, all for the existing citizenry and for their descendants. But not just for them. Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 grants Congress the power “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization … throughout the United States.”
Leave aside, for a moment, current controversies over whether and how the federal government can prevent the states from obstructing the enforcement of federal immigration laws. The larger point is that the Framers envisioned that it was possible and desirable that foreign migrants enter the U.S. and, under specified terms and conditions, become full citizens.
This was inconsistent with British and European ideas, which envisioned that people born within a kingdom would remain subjects of its monarch for life. This was the basis on which the British impressed American seamen, capturing them in ships and enrolling them in the Royal Navy — the main reason Congress declared war in 1812.
The Founders’ attitude toward immigration and citizenship was enunciated best by the man who presided over the Constitutional Convention and who was elected unanimously as the first president, George Washington.
After his election, Washington embarked on carefully choreographed tours of the northern and then the southern states. The story is told vividly in Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2021 book Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy.
On his northern trip, Washington skipped Rhode Island, which didn’t ratify the Constitution until May 1790, but he paid a special visit in August 1791. There, he made a point of stopping at the Touro Synagogue in Newport, where the Jewish community dated back to 1658.
Washington was very much aware that Article VI of the Constitution stated that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” And he certainly knew that the text of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which would be approved by Congress in September and ratified by the states in December, provided that “Congress shall pass no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
These again were departures from British and European experience. Membership in the British Parliament was open only to members of the established churches of England and Scotland, and would be until 1829. Almost every part of Europe excluded or imposed special restrictions on Jews.
Washington addressed the Touro congregation, in words echoing in part the welcome of its Warden, Moses Seixas, and spoke words that deserve to be remembered today.
“The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy — a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike the liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.”
He went on. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
In the 340 words of Washington’s letter is encased enduring guidance for immigration policy. He endorses the idea of the moral equality of all citizens and contemplates that citizenship will be extended widely, to the benefit of the nation. So much for the foolish notion that somehow “heritage Americans,” descendants of Washington’s 4 million contemporaries, have some entitlement to deference.
But there is also the notion of reciprocity. Washington’s default assumption is that people of many different backgrounds can be good citizens. But the assumption is rebuttable: they must also, he adds, give the U.S. “on all occasions their effectual support.”
Thus, Congress has the task of making prudential choices as to who can be naturalized and under what conditions — and it can provide, as it has, that citizenship once granted can be revoked under extraordinary and clearly defined circumstances.
Those prudential decisions are often controversial. Even in the Ellis Island era (1892-1924), immigration was not unrestricted: Chinese were excluded, Latin Americans were disfavored, and stringent public health restrictions were enforced, theoretically by federal inspectors but in practice by steamship companies, which did not want to provide free return passage for rejected applicants.
Some look back on the 1924 immigration act, which almost cut off immigration from southern and eastern Europe, as necessary for assimilating migrants from different cultures, although immigration fell toward zero in years of depression and war (1930-1945) and blocked by the Iron Curtain even longer (1947-1989), and assimilation was fostered during World War II and actively encouraged by articulate elites for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.
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With elites skeptical of assimilation over the last half-century, it’s not incompatible with Washington’s vision to restrict immigration from cultures that are adversarial to or incompatible with the wide range of acceptable American cultural folkways. But we block migrants from hostile venues; what about the people there who reject those cultures and cherish America’s?
In addressing such issues, it’s worth keeping in mind the counsel Washington provided in Newport 234 years ago, and the constitutional framework, including the supremacy of federal laws over state preferences, that he did so much to create.