The Bill of Rights and the Foreign Born

Extract

The United States, as Walt Whitman said, is a “nation of nations,” a nation essentially of immigrants. Their sacrifices, courage, and imagination created factories, farms, mines, and a rich intermingling of cultures.

Our country has two traditions: one that welcomes the stranger who, as Benjamin Franklin noted, is in the forefront of defending democracy; and another that in times of crisis uses the foreign bom as a scapegoat for unsolved social problems. In Jefferson's words, “the friendless alien is the safest subject for a first experiment, but the citizen will soon follow.”