This is a slightly revised version of an essay that I originally posted in August.
President Trump is trying to end illegal immigration by closing the borders to illegal immigrants and by deporting all of the 16 million or more illegal immigrants now in the U.S. To do this, he has mobilized tens of thousands of police officers (Border Patrol and ICE) and military personnel across the country to enforce his directives; and in many cases, people have been arrested, detained, and deported without constitutional due process of law. This looks like a police state and a military dictatorship.
The better way to end illegal immigration would be to make immigration legal. U.S. borders should be open to all immigrants who satisfy certain minimal criteria. And illegal immigrants already in the U.S. should be provided a pathway to legal resident status. Those with a criminal record and those unable to support themselves economically should be deported.
This would not violate anyone's constitutional rights. And this would respect the natural human right to freedom of trade: people have the right to engage in any voluntary exchange that is mutually beneficial as long as it does not unduly harm any third parties. This freedom of trade includes not only goods but also services and labor. If a foreigner wants to accept a job offer from a willing American employer, or rent an apartment from a willing landlord, no one has any right to stop them. These are contracts between consenting adults. When governments restrict immigration, they're barring free trade between natives and foreigners. This not only denies our freedom to trade, but it also deprives us of the wealth that would be created by such trade. Some economists have estimated that completely free immigration would double the GDP of the global economy, which would mean that there would be almost no poverty in the world (Clemens 2011).
Now, of course, there is one problem here in what I have just said. People have the right to engage in free trade--voluntary exchanges that are mutually beneficial to both parties--but only on the condition that this does not severely harm any third parties--creating what economists call "negative externalities." Governments use their coercive powers to prevent free immigration because many people believe that free immigration has large externalities.
People think free immigration would be economically harmful because low-skilled immigrant workers lower the average standard of living for native workers. People also think immigrants benefit from government services and welfare state programs in ways that burden native taxpayers. And don't many immigrants become dangerous criminals and terrorists? Don't these immigrants also introduce foreign cultural beliefs and practices that undermine and even dissolve the national culture of the native people?
I will respond to these objections in future posts. But here I only want to make the point that during the colonial settlement of America and then during the first one hundred and fifty years of American national independence, America had virtually open borders; and it was during that latter period that the United States became the richest and most powerful nation in the world. So, if Americans want to Make America Great Again, they will have to once again open their borders to immigrants.
OPEN BORDERS IN COLONIAL AMERICA
Although we all know that the American colonists were immigrants, most of us do not appreciate the stunning scale and diversity of that movement of immigrants to colonial America, which shows the attractiveness of America for immigrants and the lack of restrictions on immigration. In the fifteen years between the end of the Seven Years War and the Revolution--1760 to 1775--approximately 125,000 people from the British Isles immigrated to America (55,000 Irish, 40,000 Scots, and 30,000 Englishmen). There were also at least 12,000 immigrants from the German states and Switzerland, and 84,500 enslaved Africans forcibly imported to the southern colonies. This total of 221,500 arrivals in this fifteen-year period was almost 10 percent of the population of America in 1775, which means an annual entry of about 15,000 people, which was close to the population of Boston during these years (Bailyn 1986a, 9; 1986b, 26).
Moreover, this movement of immigrants was multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-lingual. Historian Bernard Bailyn describes it as "a composite of ethnic and religious groups--Germans, French, Swiss, Scotch, Scotch-Irish, English, Caribbean islanders, Africans, Afro-Americans--carrying with them different cultural baggage, different patterns of family organization and discipline, different ways of working and living together" (1986a, 59). 10 percent of the pre-Revolutionary population was German-speaking. In Georgia, "the colony was so polyglot that a successful magistrate needed to speak fluently in at least three languages and preferably four" (1986a, 17).
The American colonists knew that this openness to immigration was crucial for their economic and social growth. At the same time, some British leaders worried that the immigration to America would weaken Great Britain through depopulation, and there were attempts to restrict immigration to the colonies.
In the Declaration of Independence, this was one of the grievances against the King: "He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands" (para. 9). This is a complaint against British efforts to veto colonial legislation for assisting and encouraging immigration and British policies for limiting land grants to immigrants (Bailyn 1986b, 55-56).
THE AMERICAN NATION'S OPEN BORDERS, 1789-1921
When the Constitution was ratified in 1789, immigration had made the United States the most ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse society in the Western world. The Constitution's enumeration of congressional powers did not include any general power to regulate immigration, but it did include a power over naturalizing immigrants as citizens: "to establish a Uniform Rule of Naturalization" (Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 4). The Constitution also required citizenship as a qualification for some of the officers of the national government. No one could be a member of the House of Representatives who had not been a citizen of the United States for at least seven years. Senators had to have been a citizen for at least nine years. And the presidency was restricted to only natural-born citizens.
The First Congress established the first uniform rule of naturalization through the Naturalization Act of 1790. The Act provided that (1) any alien being "a free white person," (2) who has resided in the United States for two years shall become a naturalized citizen after proving to a court that (3) he is "a person of good character," and (4) after taking an oath or affirmation to support the Constitution of the United States.
This Act also provided that the children of such naturalized citizens being under the age of 21 years shall be considered citizens of the United States, and that the children of citizens of the United States born out of the limits of the United States shall be considered natural born citizens.
In 1795, Congress amended this law to require that a declaration of intent to become a citizen must be submitted at least three years before naturalization, and to extend the minimum residence requirement to five years.
In 1798, as part of the Alien and Sedition Acts, a Congress controlled by the Federalist Party lengthened the period for the declaration of intent to five years, lengthened the residence requirement to fourteen years, and barred the naturalization of any alien from a country at war with the United States.
In 1802, after the victory of Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party in the election of 1800, the Congress repealed the previous laws and restored both the five-year residence requirement and the three-year declaration of intent period.
The critical point to notice here is that although the Congress limited naturalization to "free white persons," it did not limit the entry of immigrants who became residents but not citizens. (The Naturalization Act of 1870 extended eligibility for naturalization to African Americans.)
From 1789 to 1875, the borders of the United States were completely open to immigrants. Then, from 1875 to 1921, the borders were largely open with a few exceptions. In 1875, the Congress prohibited the immigration of convicts, East Asian women, and indentured servants. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which did indeed exclude Chinese from immigrating to the United States. This was the one big exception to the rule of open borders.
Between 1820 and 1924, 36 million people immigrated to the United States. If their American-born descendants are added to this number, this would account for most of the growth in the U.S. population during this period--from 9.6 million in 1820 to 106 million in 1920.
The most severe restrictions on immigration began in 1921 with the Emergency Quota Act and in 1924 with the National Origins Quota Act, which set very low quotas for European immigration, particularly for Southern and Eastern Europe. Those who wrote and supported this legislation (like the Ku Klux Klan) were clear that they wanted to protect the racial purity of the "American stock" from the degeneration of Catholics and Jews. The total immigration quota of 165,000 for countries outside the Western Hemisphere was an 80% reduction from the average before World War I. Remarkably, however, there were no restrictions on Mexican or Hispanic immigration from Central America and South America.
The 1924 Act also created the U.S. Border Patrol and established a consular control system that allowed entry only to those who obtained a visa from a U.S. consulate.
The 1924 Act was revised by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and finally replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which went into effect in 1968. Although this established a more liberal immigration system than the 1924 Act, the 1965 Act was still much more restrictive than the open immigration system of the nineteenth century. Since 1968, the average inflow of immigrants per year in proportion to the resident population was more than double what it had been from 1922 to 1967, but this was still less than half the inflow of immigrants from 1820 to 1921 (Nowrasteh and Powell 2021, 193).
IMMIGRANTS IN LINCOLN'S NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM
Scottish, Swedish, German, Irish, and French Soldiers of the Union Army at the Siege of Corinth, Mississippi, 1862
From 1830 to 1860, ten million foreign born people crossed America's open borders and settled in the United States. This made them one-third of the total 30 million Americans in 1860. That was a critical turning point in American history because this huge migration decided the outcome of the deepest crisis in American political culture.
In the presidential election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln's victory depended upon his winning a large portion of the immigrant vote--particularly, the Germans, who were staunchly anti-slavery. Lincoln won the Northwestern states of Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Iowa by winning huge majorities in German districts (Holzer 2024, 133-36, 144-45). Again, in the election of 1864, Lincoln won reelection with the support of German voters (Holzer 2024, 303-20).
In response to Lincoln's election in 1860, the secessionist Southern States left the Union and started the Civil War a few weeks after Lincoln's inauguration because they saw this as the only way to preserve slavery. As I have indicated in previous posts, the Civil War can be seen as a war over the interpretation of the Declaration of Independence--over whether the declaration that "all men are created equal" in their rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" really includes all men of all races, or whether it includes only "the white race," or perhaps only the British people.
In a speech in Springfield, Illinois, on June 12, 1857, Stephen Douglas argued that the framers of the Declaration of Independence surely did not include the "African race" in its principle of equality. Rather, what they meant was "that they referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they declared to have been created equal--that they were speaking of British subjects on this continent being equal to British subjects born and residing in Great Britain--that they were entitled to the same inalienable rights, and among them were enumerated life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Douglas 1857, 9).
Two weeks later, Lincoln spoke in Springfield. He quoted the passage above from Douglas's speech, and he remarked: "Why, according to this, not only negroes but white people outside of Great Britain and America are not spoken of in that instrument. The English, Irish, and Scotch, along with white Americans, were included to be sure, but the French, Germans, and other white people of the world are all gone to pot along with the Judge's inferior races." Against this, Lincoln insisted that the Declaration of Independence really did extend its principle of equality to "all men" or "the whole human family," which would encompass all races, including all Europeans (Lincoln 1989, 1:398-99).
It should be noted, however, that one year later, Douglas began to speak of the "white basis" of government as "confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races" (Lincoln 1989, 1:504). So, this indicated that he was no longer confining the principle of equality of rights to the British people.
On July 10, 1858, Lincoln delivered a speech at Chicago that stated the arguments that he would develop in his debates with Douglas that would begin a month later; and his fundamental argument was about the principle of equality of rights in the Declaration as embracing all Americans and including both black Americans and foreign immigrants. When we celebrate the Fourth of July, he said, we celebrate the men of 1776--"a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers." But we also realize that of the 30 million American people of today, many are not descended by blood from those first Americans. We have
. . . perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe--German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian--men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they ae part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world (Lincoln 1989, 1:456).
This leads him to the conclusion of his speech--that we should reject all talk about "inferior races": "let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man--this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position--discarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout the land, until we shall once again stand up declaring that all men are created equal."
So, what unites the native-born Americans and the foreign-born Americans as "one people" is their patriotic love of America and their affirming the universal principle of the Declaration of Independence that all human beings are born free and equal. What makes Americans Americans is their moral character as "patriotic and liberty-loving men."
In the Civil War, Lincoln made it clear that enforcing the Declaration's principle of equality of rights as the "standard maxim for free society" would require not only emancipating the black slaves but also promoting free immigration into the United States. And once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, it became clear that a victory for the Union in that war would be a victory for this expansive interpretation of the Declaration of Independence.
Remarkably, the eventual Union victory depended in large degree on the millions of immigrants who had entered the United States under the open borders policy. The key to Lincoln's strategy for defeating the Confederacy was exploiting the advantage of the Union in its greater numbers of soldiers--over twice as many as the Confederates. This was due to the greater population of the Northern states, which gave them a greater pool of potential military recruits. Not only was the Confederacy weakened by its small total population--about one-third that of the Union--but as a slave society, the Confederacy lacked access to 40 percent of its adult male military-age population, who were enslaved and thus not eligible for service. This left about 965,000 free white men between the ages of 18 to 45 to draw on for military service. But then, of course, not every adult white man could serve. This meant that at most the Confederacy could put an army of no more than about five hundred thousand men in the field (McCurry 2010).
The greater population of the North can be explained as largely the consequence of the liberal social order in the North that had attracted millions of immigrants from overseas and many migrants from the South. The comparatively open and free society of the North offered more opportunities for people seeking a better life than did the illiberal South where slaves did most of the work. As Lincoln said, in the free states, an ambitious man "can better his condition" because "there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer" (1989, 2:144). Of the ten million overseas immigrants to the United States who entered from the 1830s to the 1850s, most of them (about seven-eighths) settled in the North. Also, the migration of white Southerners to the North was three times greater than the migration from the North to the South. Over 40 percent of the Union's armed forces were immigrants and the sons of immigrants--totaling about 600,000 out of 2.1 million. The Confederacy had only a few thousand immigrants fighting for them (Doyle 2015, 158-81).
At the epic Battle of Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania, July 1-3, 1863, there were Irish troops fighting on both sides. On the side of the Union was New York's 69th Infantry Regiment, the Fighting Irish, who played a key role in turning the tide of battle. On the second day of fighting, July 2nd, the Irish Brigade chaplain Father William Corby (later to become President of the University of Notre Dame) stood upon a large rock in front of the brigade to offer general absolution for the Catholic troops. Artist Paul Henry Wood painted a depiction of this legendary religious service based on memories of some surviving soldiers who were there.
An eyewitness recalled that "Father Corby reminded the soldiers of the high and sacred nature of their trust and the noble object for which they fought." When he finished his remarks, all the men (both Catholic and Protestant) fell to their knees and prayed for God's merciful absolution. The sounds of battle resonated all around them. For many of them this would be their last prayer.
On the decisive third day of battle, July 3, the Irish units defended the center of the Union's position on Cemetery Ridge against the largest assault of the entire war: General Robert E. Lee ordered General George Pickett to lead his men in a charge across almost a mile of open land, where the Rebels were exposed to the fire of Union troops, but with the hope that if the Rebels broke through the Union lines, this would give the Confederates a victory in the North that could be the decisive turn in the war.
The Union Irishmen held their ground. One veteran described it years later: they "stood immovable, unconquerable, fearless and splendid in their valor, the green flag waving side by side with the colors of their adopted country, both held aloft by the stone wall until the victory was assured, and the hosts of the enemy crushed." Of the 532 men in the Irish Brigade, 198 were lost at Gettysburg, a casualty rate close to 40 percent (Holzer 2024, 270-72).
On November 20, 1863, Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery for the over 7,000 men--both Union and Confederate--who had fallen in those three days of battle. He explained that those who had died on that battlefield had given their lives that the new American nation might live as the nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that are men are created equal.
It was for us the living, he added, to be dedicated to the unfinished work for which they died--"that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Only nineteen days later, Lincoln submitted his Annual Message to Congress, which indicated that the "new birth of freedom" would require not only the Reconstruction of the Southern States with emancipation of the slaves but also a new system for encouraging free immigration.
I again submit to your consideration the expediency of establishing a system for the encouragement of immigration. Although this source of national wealth and strength is again flowing with greater freedom than for several years before the insurrection occurred, there is still a great deficiency of laborers in every field of industry, especially in agriculture and in our mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals. While the demand for labor is thus increased here, tens of thousands of persons, destitute of remunerative occupation, are thronging our foreign consulates, and offering to emigrate to the United States if essential, but very cheap, assistance can be afforded them. It is easy to see that, under the sharp discipline of civil war, the nation is beginning a new life. This noble effort demands the aid, and ought to receive the attention and support of the government (Lincoln 1989, 2:541-42).
Notice that Lincoln saw immigration as a "source of national wealth and strength," particularly in satisfying the "demand for labor" at a time when the Civil War had created a severe labor shortage. Notice also that he saw promoting immigration as especially important because "under the sharp discipline of civil war, the nation is beginning a new life"--the "new birth of freedom" that he foresaw at Gettysburg.
Lincoln wanted the government to allocate federal funding to assist immigrants who were "destitute of remunerative occupation" in foreign countries. Although the Congress did not approve this proposal for direct funding of immigrants, the Congress did approve extending the benefits of the 1862 Homestead Act for foreign immigrants. Congress also authorized the setting up of a Immigration Bureau in the State Department. And the U.S. Emigrant Office in New York was authorized to help foreign workers find American jobs and arrange transportation for them (Holzer 2024, 288-98). Lincoln signed the Act for the Encouragement of Immigration on July 4, 1864.
But Lincoln wanted more to be done for facilitating more immigration. The 1864 Republican Party Platform resolved that "foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations, should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy" (Holzer 2024, 304). In his Annual Message to Congress of December 6, 1864, Lincoln observed that the previously passed act for encouraging immigration
seems to need amendment which will enable the officers of the government to prevent the practice of frauds against the immigrants while on their way and on their arrival in the ports, so as to secure them here a free choice of avocations and places of settlement. A liberal disposition towards this great national policy is manifested by most of the European States, and ought to be reciprocated on our part by giving the immigrants effective national protection. I regard our emigrants as one of the replenishing streams which are appointed by Providence to repair the ravages of internal war, and its wastes of national strength and health. All that is necessary is to secure the flow of that stream in its present fulness, and to that end the government must, in every way, make it manifest that it neither needs nor designs to impose involuntary military service upon those who come from other lands to cast their lot in our country (Lincoln 1989, 2:650).
It is remarkable that Lincoln wanted immigrants to be exempt from the national military conscription act that Congress had passed in 1863. Although the great majority of Union soldiers were volunteers, the military draft was supposed to fill in when voluntary enlistments fell short. Conscription was very unpopular, even provoking draft riots. So Lincoln's offering exemption from the draft as an incentive for immigration shows how important free immigration was for him.
Perhaps even more impressive is how Lincoln saw immigration as ordained by God--"appointed by Providence" to be a "replenishing stream" to restore "national strength and health."
Isn't there enough evidence here to justify Trump and Vance in denouncing Lincoln as a crazy globalist and woke advocate of open borders?
OPEN BORDERS AS CULTURAL GROUP SELECTION FOR FREEDOM
As I have argued previously, global human migration shows what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free. John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies. The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous societies. While countries like New Zealand have adopted the Lockean liberal immigration policy, the United States under the rule of Trump the Nationalist is raising barriers to immigration, which means that if the United States continues to move away from Lockean liberalism, it will become a loser in this evolutionary process of cultural group selection, in which people vote with their feet in favor of freedom.
Not too far off Ellis Island in New York's harbor stands the Statue of Liberty, erected in 1886. Lady Liberty holds a tablet in her left arm inscribed with a date--"July IV MDCCLXXVI"--that invokes the Declaration of Independence. A poem is engraved at its base: "Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . ." Notice that the only qualification for entry to America is that the immigrants "yearn to breathe free." By 1886, the annual number of immigrants entering the United States was approaching one million.
Lady Liberty is a globalist!
So we can expect that Trump will soon sign an executive order for replacing the Statue of Liberty with the Statue of Closed Borders. Instead of Lady Liberty with her torch held high, we will have a burly masked ICE officer clubbing an immigrant.
REFERENCES
Bailyn, Bernard. 1986a. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. New York: Random House.
Bailyn, Bernard. 1986b. Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution. New York: Random House.
Clemens, Michael. 2011. "Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?" Journal of Economic Perspectives 25: 83-106.
Douglas, Stephen. 1857. Remarks of the Hon. Stephen Douglas, on Kansas, Utah, and the Dred Scott Decision. Chicago: Daily Times Book Office.
Doyle, Don H. 2015. The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. New York: Basic Books.
Holzer, Harold. 2024. Brought Forth On This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration. New York: Dutton.
Lincoln, Abraham. 1989. Speeches and Writings. 2 vols. Ed. Don Fehrenbacher. New York: Library of America.
McCurry, Stephanie. 2010. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Nowrasteh, Alex, and Benjamin Powell. 2021. Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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