Immigration, perhaps more than any other issue today, reveals the chasm that so often exists between “democracy” and the actual will of the people. Polls consistently find solid majorities of Americans in favor of immigration reductions, yet the problem grows more severe and out of control each year.

Every morning on my way to work, I drive by a 7-Eleven in Farmingville, N.Y., where a large group of, um, “undocumented” Mexicans can be found waiting to be hired out for day jobs. Perhaps 50 feet down the road is a small group holding signs reading “Deport Illegal Aliens.” Drivers wave and honk in support, but still those who profess to govern us do absolutely nothing to secure our borders.

One of the ways in which pro-immigration propagandists have sought to attain the moral high ground is by the implicit suggestion that the right of immigration is a hallowed national principle that no loyal American can consistently oppose. Yet this usually unexamined premise is actually false. The Founding Fathers were generally wary of immigration, a phenomenon that they did not wish to exclude altogether but that they saw no particular need to encourage, especially among migrants whose cultural backgrounds were significantly different from their own.

Consider Benjamin Franklin, that well-known cosmopolite and child of the Enlightenment. Franklin, it turns out, said quite a few politically incorrect things about non-British humanity. On one occasion he asked, “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion?” Thus immigrants of sufficient number and concentration could radically change the cultural landscape in ways that the native population may not want.

We can already hear the modern liberal laughing at Franklin, pointing triumphantly to German assimilation in America as proof that the Pennsylvanian’s concerns were utterly without merit. But the point here is simply this: if unrestricted immigration had really been a traditional American principle, someone must have forgotten to tell Benjamin Franklin. And he was speaking of people who, as fellow heirs and architects of Western civilization, shared a great deal in common with the original settlers of British America. One can only imagine what Franklin would have had to say of the Third World onslaught caused by our current immigration policy.

Thomas Jefferson’s warning in his Notes on Virginia would doubtless come as a surprise to most Americans, since most American history textbooks for some reason choose not to highlight it. Jefferson asked, suggestively, “Are there no inconveniences to be thrown into the scale against the advantage expected by a multiplication of numbers by the importation of foreigners?”

“It is for the happiness of those united in society,” the sage of Monticello went on to explain, “to harmonize as much as possible, in matters which they must of necessity transact together. Civil government being the sole object of forming societies, its administration must be conducted by common consent.” Our government was “a composition of the freest principles of the English Constitution, with others, derived from natural right and reason.” Nothing could be more opposed to the principles of our government than those of absolute monarchies, said Jefferson. But it was from such regimes that we could expect the most immigrants.

Such immigrants, Jefferson feared, would “bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.” The effects of a large influx of population from places without any experience with our kind of government and society could only introduce confusion and discord. “These principles, with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”

Jefferson concluded that it was “safer” to wait patiently for the natural increase of the American population rather than achieve such increase by mass immigration, and that our government would, as a result, be more peaceable and more durable. He left readers with a useful thought experiment: “Suppose 20 millions of republican Americans thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom? If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we may believe that the addition of half a million of foreigners to our present numbers would produce a similar effect here.”

Jefferson was joined in his wariness by Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. In his draft of a speech for George Washington, Hamilton wrote: “To render the people of this country as homogeneous as possible, must tend as much as any other circumstance to the permanence of their union and posterity.” (Who kept forgetting to tell our forefathers of the benefits of mass immigration?)

Several years later, when Jefferson called for liberalizing the naturalization laws in his December 1801 message to Congress, Hamilton recalled Jefferson’s earlier sentiments from the Notes on Virginia. (This lapse in Jefferson’s judgment appears to have been of partisan origin: Jefferson himself, along with several of his prominent opponents, believed that the foreign vote had won him the election of 1800.) He agreed with Jefferson that it was praiseworthy for the United States to permit the entry of those experiencing genuine hardship and seeking asylum, though even here Hamilton would have reminded his fellow citizens that generosity has its limitations if the welfare of the country is to be protected. What he objected to was the suggestion that all such people were necessarily entitled to the privileges of citizenship. He concluded by pointing out that even granting for the sake of argument that American Indians had extended nothing but friendship as the colonists arrived on these shores, it is instructive to consider the fate of a people whose policy was so magnanimous. “[P]rudence requires us,” Hamilton wrote, “to trace the history further and ask what has become of the nations of savages who exercised this policy, and who now occupies the territory which they then inhabited? Perhaps a lesson is here taught which ought not to be despised.”

Hamilton described the safety of a republic as depending “essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family.” He then drew out the obvious implications of this point:

The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities. In the composition of society, the harmony of the ingredients is all-important, and whatever tends to a discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency.

For Hamilton, immigration policy was a matter of prudence and good sense, not a moral imperative. He observed at the turn of the 19th century, “[I]n the infancy of the country, with a boundless waste to people, it was politic to give a facility to naturalization; but our situation is now changed. It appears from the last census that we have increased about one third in ten years; after allowing for what we have gained from abroad, it will be quite apparent that the natural progress of our own population is sufficiently rapid for strength, security, and settlement.”

Writing to John Adams in 1794, George Washington contended that the United States had no real reason to encourage immigration. Washington said that “except of useful mechanics and some particular descriptions of men or professions, there is no need of encouragement [of immigration], while the policy or advantage of its taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the Language, habits, and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them.”

Rufus King, who had attended the Constitutional Convention as a delegate from Massachusetts, was concerned about the character of the immigrants whom America may attract. He wrote in a 1798 letter, “[I]t was the practice of the Emigrants from Scotland to bring with them Certificates from the religious Societies to which they belonged, of their honesty, sobriety, and generally of their good Character! Why should we not require some such Document from all Emigrants, and it would be well to add to the Testimonial that the person to whom it was granted was not expelled from his Country and had not been convicted of any crime.” He wondered, “If from the emigrations of past time we have suffered inconvenience and our true national character has been disfigured, what are we to expect from the Emigrants of the present Day?”

John Jay, who would become the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, in Federalist No. 2 positively celebrated the fact that for all its “diversity,” the United States consisted essentially of people whose religious and cultural traits were broadly similar and compatible, rather than widely divergent and a potential threat to social comity. “Providence,” he wrote, “has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.”

According to Professor Thomas G. West of the University of Dallas, “None of the Founders gave a theoretical account of the right of a political community to exclude would-be immigrants. That is because such a right was obvious to all as an inference from the general principles they all shared. No one in the early debates in Congress on the naturalization laws doubted the government’s right to determine exclusionary criteria for citizenship.”

At the Constitutional Convention, for example, New York’s Gouverneur Morris warned of being “polite at the expense of prudence.” He noted that the privileges that emigrants enjoyed in the United States were considerably greater than in the rest of the world but concluded by reminding his listeners that “every Society from a great Nation down to a Club had the right of declaring the conditions on which new members should be admitted.”

Decades ago, proof that the Founders did not approve of mass immigration might have been an argument in favor of rethinking current immigration policy. Today, the politically correct automatons who inhabit our nation’s universities would be more likely to conclude that the Founding Fathers were racists whose views should be of no account.

But if the Founding Fathers were racists for opposing mass immigration, so is virtually everyone in the vast bulk of the nations of the world right now since hardly any country outside the self-destructive West favors immigration that would undermine and overwhelm the social and cultural features that make their nations unique. The Founders recommended the kind of prudence and common sense that any nation observes in its immigration policy. If only the Bush administration would listen.  __________________________________________

Thomas E. Woods Jr. holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and is associate editor of the Latin Mass magazine.