What Washington, Hamilton and Jefferson Feared and Hoped About Newcomers

Politicians love to say the Founders would agree with them about immigration. It is a safe claim, because the Founders are not around to complain. Each side reaches into the founding generation, pulls out the quotation it likes, and holds it up like a winning ticket.

The trouble is that the founding generation did not speak with one voice, and the three most useful witnesses, Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton, disagreed with each other in ways that still teach us something. All three welcomed immigrants. All three worried about them. And each of the three linked the question to the same thing: whether a self-governing people can stay self-governing as its membership changes. I will give you what each one actually said, paraphrasing wherever I am not certain of the wording, and then draw out what they have in common.

Why These Three

Before the details, a word about method. Quoting a Founder on immigration is a risky business, because their remarks come from different years, different audiences and different purposes. A letter to an Irish society that wants to flatter America is not a legislative position. A passage in a book about Virginia's geography is not a statute. An anonymous newspaper essay is a political brief.

So I will do what a careful reader does: identify the setting, state the point, and resist the temptation to turn a passing remark into a platform. Where I quote, I quote what I know. Elsewhere I paraphrase and say so.

Washington to the Irish, 1783

In December 1783, as the Revolutionary War ended, George Washington answered an address from a group in Ireland, the Volunteer Association, that had written to congratulate him. His reply is one of the most quoted passages in the whole immigration debate, and it deserves to be, though usually only half of it is quoted.

The warm half is this. Washington said the American continent was open to receive not only the wealthy and the well-regarded from abroad but also the oppressed and persecuted of every nation and religion, and that they would be welcomed to the rights and privileges of the new country. A people that had just won independence and was proud of it wanted the world to know that the new republic would be a refuge.

The second half is the condition. The welcome was extended, as Washington put it, to those who by decent conduct appeared to merit the enjoyment of those rights. Washington did not say that anyone who came was owed full membership on arrival. He said that those who behaved decently and earned it would be welcomed in. That is a standard, and it is a standard about conduct.

Read together, the two halves give us the first thing the three men share. Welcome and conduct went together in Washington's mind, and he saw no contradiction in it. A refuge that does not expect anything of the refugees is not a republic. It is a waiting room.

Washington returned to the theme later, in his Farewell Address of 1796, with a different emphasis. There he warned the country against the dangers of foreign influence and urged Americans to guard against attachments to other nations that could pull the republic away from its own interests. He was speaking mainly about governments and parties, not about immigrants as such. But the concern ran in the same direction. A free people must keep its independence of mind and its loyalty at home.

Jefferson in Query VIII

Thomas Jefferson tackled the subject in his Notes on the State of Virginia, written in the early 1780s and published in the middle of that decade. In Query VIII, on population, he asked whether Virginia should encourage immigration to fill its empty land. His answer was cautious, and it surprises people who know only the Jefferson of the Declaration.

Jefferson worried about where the newcomers would come from. Many European countries, he observed, were governed by absolute monarchs. People who grew up under such governments, he reasoned, would bring with them the habits and attitudes of subjects, a deference to authority and a taste for arbitrary power. He feared they would carry those attitudes into American politics, and he worried that a legislature built from such material would be hard to govern by the principles of a free republic. I am paraphrasing here, because I have not tried to reproduce his sentences.

His proposed remedy was not a ban. It was patience. He worked out that the existing population would double by natural increase in about twenty-seven years, and he asked whether it was wise to import foreigners to reach a larger population only slightly sooner, given the risk to the national character.

I would not hold up Jefferson's argument as a model. His premise was a guess about the political habits of whole peoples, and the next two centuries disproved it in most cases. Immigrants from monarchies and from every other sort of government became good Americans in large numbers. But the form of his worry is worth keeping, because it asks a real question: what do people bring with them, and how do they come to share the principles of the country they join? He did not question that immigrants could become Americans. He asked how, and how fast.

Later, as president, Jefferson called for a more liberal naturalization law, a shift from his Query VIII caution. The difference tells us something about him and about the genuine debate. In the 1780s he was a philosopher worried about republican character. In 1801 he was a politician who had been hurt by the long waiting period that the Federalists passed in 1798, and who now wanted a lighter rule. Both Jeffersons were sincere, and both are useful.

Hamilton in 1802

Alexander Hamilton was himself an immigrant, born in the West Indies and arrived in New York as a teenager. You might expect him to be the champion of open doors. He was not.

In late 1801 and early 1802, after Jefferson's annual message asked Congress to revisit the naturalization laws, Hamilton wrote a series of essays in a New York newspaper, the Evening Post, under the title "The Examination." Among other things, he took up the proposal to ease the terms of naturalization and argued against it. (The essays appeared under a pen name, and scholars attribute them to Hamilton.)

Hamilton's argument, in paraphrase, ran along these lines. A nation, he thought, needs a certain unity of character and sentiment to hold together, and a government like ours depends upon it. His target was admitting newcomers to the full rights of citizenship indiscriminately and at once. He held that admitting a large number of foreigners before they had acquired a real attachment to the country and an understanding of its institutions would put the political order at risk. He worried about foreign influence on the choice of rulers and about the danger that a large body of new voters, without long experience of free institutions, would be easy to manipulate. He argued that the political rights of citizenship should come after a period of residence that allowed the newcomer's habits and loyalties to settle.

Notice how this fits with his own history. Hamilton was not talking about himself, and he did not think he was a counterexample. He had arrived as a boy, been educated here, fought in the Revolution, and given his whole life to the American cause. His point was that his case was the one the law should aim at: attachment shown by years of residence and demonstrated loyalty, not a quick transaction.

You can disagree with Hamilton. His critics at the time said he was being partisan, and in that they had a point: the Federalists were losing the immigrant vote, and a slower path to the ballot box helped them. But his argument has to be taken seriously on its merits, because it is the clearest founding-era statement of a view that remains common among conservatives: that citizenship is a trust, that trust requires time, and that a republic is entitled to ask newcomers to earn it.

What the Three Share

Here is where the three men converge, and it is the part most worth taking away.

One. They all wanted immigrants. Washington offered America as a refuge. Jefferson, whatever his worries in the 1780s, wrote the Declaration's complaint that the King blocked the encouragement of migration, as you can read in The Forgotten Immigration Grievance in the Declaration of Independence. Hamilton, himself an immigrant, aimed his fire at how quickly newcomers should get citizenship, not at their arrival. Nobody in this group argued for a closed country.

Two. They all worried about attachment. Washington spoke of decent conduct and warned about foreign influence. Jefferson asked whether people raised under absolute governments could take up the habits of free ones. Hamilton asked whether newcomers had acquired the understanding that self-government requires. The three of them were asking one question in three different tones: how does a newcomer become a participant in self-government?

Three. They all assumed the answer was a matter of time and conduct, and none of them thought it was automatic. Their solutions differed in degree. Washington emphasized behavior, Jefferson emphasized patience, Hamilton emphasized a long residency requirement. But none of them thought that the mere fact of arrival made someone a full member of the political community.

Four. They all believed the decision belonged to the people through their government. The way to settle disagreements about the terms was legislation, and that is what happened: Congress wrote the rules in 1790, 1795, 1798 and 1802, as you can see in One Uniform Rule, How the First Congresses Wrote America's Naturalization Laws.

Where They Differed, and Why It Matters

The differences are instructive too.

Jefferson and Hamilton disagreed about the pace. Jefferson was more willing, once in office, to ease the terms of citizenship, because he thought the republic's principles were strong enough to absorb newcomers and that an excessively long wait would insult the very people who most valued liberty. Hamilton thought a long wait was a safeguard, because the republic's principles were fragile and needed protection. This is the same disagreement we have now. One side trusts the power of American institutions to assimilate; the other fears that institutions can be overwhelmed.

Here is my own view. Assimilation is real, and it is not automatic. American culture has absorbed enormous numbers of people because it has asked something of them: a common language, a common civic creed, a common set of laws. Where those expectations are held up, assimilation works. Where they are abandoned, it falters. That is a conservative argument for demanding more of the process, not less, and it was Hamilton's argument in spirit. For a related point about language, see English as a Common Language Is a Gift to Newcomers, Not a Barrier.

And the other side's best argument is also in the founding record. Jefferson's later view, and the repeal of the 1798 law, show that a republic gains by inviting people to join it and trusting them to rise. A country that thinks its ideas are right should be confident about what happens when newcomers meet them.

Using the Founders Honestly

So what should a citizen do with this evidence? Don't use it as a weapon. The honest use of the founding record is to see that the founders themselves held the two ideas together: welcome and condition, generosity and attachment. The restrictionist who quotes Hamilton and ignores Washington's welcome is cherry-picking. The advocate who quotes Washington and ignores Hamilton and Jefferson's worries is doing the same thing from the other direction.

The Constitution's own answer was not to settle the debate but to settle who would conduct it. Congress writes the rules, under Article I, Section 8, and the people hold Congress to account. That structure invites exactly the argument the three men were having, and it invites you into it.

The case in brief

1. Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton all welcomed immigrants, and all three worried about whether newcomers would take up the habits of self-government.
2. Washington's 1783 letter to the Irish welcomed the oppressed of every nation and tied the welcome to decent conduct, and his Farewell Address warned against foreign influence.
3. Jefferson's Query VIII doubted that people raised under absolute monarchies would adapt quickly, a guess later history disproved, though his question about how newcomers learn republican habits remains fair.
4. Hamilton's 1802 essays argued that citizenship should come after enough residence to form real attachment, which is the founding-era case for a serious naturalization standard.
5. The shared lesson is that immigration is a decision for a self-governing people acting through Congress, balancing welcome against attachment.

What you can do: pick one of the three Founders, read his own words in full, and write down in two sentences where he is more cautious and where he is more generous than the slogans attributed to him.