Explorers and settlers were the first to follow Columbus. Most of the Spanish and Portuguese went to Mexico, Central and South America; most of the French migrated to Canada; and the English, Scots, Irish, Welsh, Dutch, and Germans settled in what became the 13 original colonies. They wrote the Declaration of Independence, fought the Revolution, fashioned the Constitution with its Bill of Rights, and fixed the cultural, economic, and political patterns of the country. The government and society they created came from their own Northern and West European cultural and political background.
It was an English speaking nation with free institutions based upon Anglo-Saxon culture and English common law.
Our Founding Fathers did not encourage unlimited immigration. George Washington felt that immigration should be limited to "useful mechanics and some particular descriptions of men or professions."
Thomas Jefferson saw the new government as a unique combination of the freest elements of English law and political custom. He was concerned that unrestricted immigration of peoples from lands unacquainted with the principle of representative government might undo the careful work of our Founding Fathers. "Yet," he said prophetically, "from such we are to expect the greatest number of immigrants."
Even if these immigrants could throw off the principles of the governments they left, Jefferson feared that they would merely pass"from one extreme to the other. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty." He added, "In proportion to their numbers, they will share legislation with us. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp or bias its direction and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent mass."[snip]
Although opposed to mass immigration, the Founding Fathers did not prevent or discourage it by federal legislation. They left it to the states individually to regulate and control immigration according to their specific needs.
Immigration grew at an acceptable and useful rate, and the population rose from 26,000 in 1640 to 2,500,000 in 1775, to 12,866,000 by 1830. Westward expanding America needed able men to work the mines, lay the rails, till the soil, and build the towns, and so during these growing years, immigration was actively encouraged. In 1834, Congress aided Polish exiles to settle in Illinois and Michigan. The Homestead Act of 1862 drew others through cheap land grants. Entrepreneurs advertised abroad for immigrant workers for the expanding mills, mines, factories, and farms.
Between 1830 and 1880, a total of 10,189,000 immigrants came to the United States. Of these, 8,989,800 were from Northern Europe, and 654,000 were from Canada and Newfoundland.
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Today, the annual tidal wave of over a million immigrants (legal and illegal) is endangering our American way of life. Currently, fewer than 15% of our immigrants come from Europe and share the heritage that made America strong. A majority of today's immigrants are (consciously or unconsciously) undermining our customs, our culture, our language, and our institutions. Instead of remaining in their native lands and emulating the United States, they are descending upon our shores and trying to reshape the United States into the image of the lands they forsook.
