The Forgotten Immigration Grievance in the Declaration of Independence

Every Fourth of July somebody reads the Declaration of Independence aloud, and every Fourth of July the crowd waits through the long middle, the list of charges against the King, to get to the good parts at either end. The middle is the part people skip. That is a mistake, because the list of grievances is where the Founders showed what they thought a free people was entitled to do. And buried in that list is a charge about immigration that both sides of today's argument manage to ignore.

I mean to read it closely. This is a document post, so we will take the text a passage at a time, say what it meant in 1776, and ask what it means now. The Declaration is in the public domain and every word quoted here is from the engrossed text. Read along.

The Passage

Among the long indictment, in the section that begins "He has..." and runs through more than two dozen charges, you will find this one:

He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

Three separate accusations sit inside that single sentence.

The first is that the King obstructed the colonies' laws for the naturalization of foreigners. The colonial legislatures had passed such laws, and the Crown had blocked them.

The second is that he refused to pass others "to encourage their Migrations hither." In other words, he would not allow the colonies to make themselves attractive to newcomers.

The third is that he raised "the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands," which means he made it harder for settlers to take up new land on the frontier.

The charge's stated purpose is at the front: the King wanted to "prevent the Population of these States." Not to manage it. To prevent it. The colonists thought the Crown was holding the country back by choking off the people who would fill it.

What the Colonists Had Built

To see why the grievance mattered, you have to know what the colonies were doing. America was short of people and long on land. The colonial economy needed labor and farmers and craftsmen, and the colonial assemblies knew it. They wanted settlers from Germany, Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands and France, many of them Protestants fleeing persecution at home, and they wanted them to have a path to full membership.

Naturalization in the colonies was complicated, because the law of the empire was made in London. In 1740 Parliament passed the Plantation Act, which allowed foreign Protestants, and Jews, who had lived in the colonies for seven years to be naturalized there, with the oath adapted for the purpose. Colonial assemblies also passed their own acts, admitting particular individuals and groups to the rights of subjects within a colony. That is the "Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners" the Declaration speaks of.

Then the Crown began to stop them. In 1773, the British government instructed royal governors in the colonies not to approve colonial naturalization bills. The colonists read the order as London keeping control of who could join colonial society. Jefferson and his generation took this as one more proof that the Crown did not see the colonies as partners in a growing community, but as holdings to be managed for the benefit of someone else. Their reply, in 1776, was to put the complaint in the Declaration.

What the Grievance Claims

Read carefully, the passage claims a right, and the right is a specific one. It is the right of a self-governing community to decide, through its own representatives, which outsiders will be admitted as members.

Notice what the passage does not say. It does not say that anyone anywhere has a right to come. It does not say the colonies should have no rules. The colonists were complaining about the Crown's interference with their laws, laws that set the terms for admission. They were asserting that the people who live in a place, acting through their own legislatures, are the proper authority to make those decisions.

That is the principle underneath the whole Declaration. The document's second paragraph says that governments derive "their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed." A people who consent to a government are a people who have decided to form a political community, and a political community that cannot decide who belongs to it is not governing itself. It is being governed by whoever does decide.

Here is the point I want you to take away. The grievance is not "the King restricted immigration." It is "the King took away our say over immigration." The charge is about who decides. That distinction matters enormously, and it is lost in most of today's shouting.

The Two Mistakes Today's Debate Makes

Take the first mistake, which is common on the restrictionist side. Some conservatives read the Declaration, notice that the colonists wanted control over their own membership, and conclude the Founders were skeptical of immigration. The text says nearly the opposite. The grievance is that the King prevented population growth. The colonists wanted more people, "to encourage their Migrations hither." They were so keen on newcomers that they blamed the Crown for keeping them out. A fair reading of the document gives no comfort to anyone who thinks the colonists considered immigration a threat in itself.

Now the second mistake, common on the other side. Some advocates read the same line and conclude that the Founders favored open doors, and that any limit on immigration is un-American. The text says nothing of the kind either. The grievance is about the terms on which newcomers were admitted. It speaks of "Laws for Naturalization," meaning rules, conditions and a legal process. The colonists wanted to write those rules, not to abolish them. A people that complains the King obstructed its naturalization laws has laws it wants to enforce.

The Founders held a middle position that neither slogan captures. They welcomed immigrants and they insisted on setting the terms. Their model was a republic that grows by invitation and by law. The same pairing shows up in the first Congress's statute, the subject of One Uniform Rule, How the First Congresses Wrote America's Naturalization Laws, and in the worries and hopes that Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton expressed about newcomers, which you can read in What Washington, Hamilton and Jefferson Feared and Hoped About Newcomers.

The Rebuttal a Skeptic Would Make

A fair skeptic could push back, and the pushback deserves an answer.

One. The grievance is eighteenth-century and addressed to a specific political fight. The colonies were part of an empire whose subjects could move freely among its parts, and "immigration" in that setting was not what it is today.

Two. The charge is a rhetorical one, a piece of a long indictment, and the drafters wanted to pile up every complaint they could, including some that were thin. One should not build a doctrine on a clause in a list.

Three. The passage says the Crown restricted population growth, which cuts against a modern argument for restriction.

All three points carry some weight, and I will concede them in turn. The first is right that the setting was different, and I am not claiming the Founders solved our problems. The second is right that a list of grievances is a political document, not a statute. And the third is right, as I said above, that the passage tells against anyone who wants to cast the Founders as hostile to newcomers.

Here is where the skeptic's case stops. A rhetorical charge still tells you what the authors believed was a legitimate complaint. The Founders did not include grievances they thought a free people had no right to make. They put this one in because they believed it was a wrong for a distant sovereign to override a people's decisions about their own membership. That belief is the part that survives the change of setting. It is an argument about who holds a power, and the answer in 1776 was the people of the community, acting through their own representatives.

The Land Clause

The last phrase of the passage is easy to skip: "raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands." It deserves a moment, because it shows how the Founders connected migration with property.

The Crown had made it harder to obtain title to western land. The Proclamation of 1763 had closed much of the territory beyond the Appalachians to settlement, and later policy tightened the terms of land grants. For the colonists, land was the way a newcomer became a self-supporting citizen. A man who owned his farm was a man who could not be bought, a voter with a stake. Restricting land was restricting the road by which an immigrant became an American.

You can see in that clause the ideal the Founders held up: a newcomer with a family, a trade or a farm, who builds something and becomes part of the community. It is the same ideal behind the old rule that an immigrant should be able to support himself, which you can read about in Self-Sufficiency Was the First Immigration Rule, the Public Charge Story. Immigration, for the Founders, was joined to the ownership of property, the building of families and the habits of work.

What the Founders Would Recognize Today

If you could put the signers in a room with a modern border debate, I think they would be startled by some things and at home with others.

They would recognize the underlying question immediately: who decides? They would side with the view that a self-governing people decides, through its legislature, and that the answer is not a court, not a foreign power and not a bureaucracy making its own rules. Where today's executive and courts quietly displace Congress, they would see something close to the grievance they listed.

They would be puzzled by a debate in which some people treat newcomers as a threat and others treat any rule as an insult. The colonists wanted people, and they wanted law. They would ask why we can't have both.

And they would be unimpressed by one habit common to both camps, which is to treat immigration as a matter of pure compassion or pure fear. The Founders treated it as a matter of building a republic: who will fill the land, who will defend it, who will share in self-government, and on what terms. That is a statecraft question, and it deserves statecraft answers.

Reading It Yourself

You can verify every word of this post by reading the Declaration. It is short enough to read in about ten minutes. Read it once straight through, then read the grievance list again slowly, and see how many of the charges are about the same thing: the King taking away the people's say over their own affairs. The immigration charge is one of them, and it fits the pattern. For a companion on the founding documents, see the Constitution page and the Founders page, and for the modern law that grew from these ideas, see How to Bring a Family Member to America the Legal Way, Step by Step.

The Declaration is not a statute, and it does not tell us how many visas to issue. It tells us who has the standing to decide. That is the more important thing to know, and it is the thing the grievance list preserves. A free people welcomes newcomers on its own terms, through its own laws. The King's mistake, in the colonists' eyes, was taking that decision away.

The case in brief

1. The Declaration charges the King with obstructing "the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners," refusing to encourage migration, and raising the terms of land grants, all in order to "prevent the Population of these States."
2. The charge rests on real events: colonial naturalization acts, the Plantation Act of 1740, and the Crown's instruction in 1773 not to approve new colonial naturalization bills.
3. The grievance claims a right of self-governing people to decide who joins them, which follows from the Declaration's principle of the consent of the governed.
4. The text refutes both slogans: it shows the colonists wanted newcomers, and it shows they wanted to set the rules.
5. The lesson for today is about who decides: immigration is a matter for a self-governing people acting through its elected representatives, neither forbidden nor uncontrolled.

What you can do: read the Declaration's grievance list start to finish this week, aloud if you can, and share the immigration passage with one person who has never noticed it.