Founding Fathers on immigration

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To the Editor:

There are some misconceptions today about the nature of our responsibilities for peoples or nations that seek refuge or to assimilate into our nation. The deep core of the issue finds itself in our misunderstanding of what our responsibilities as a country are, and what a country actually is. To start, our nation is a democratic republic, which means that the people are the source of sovereignty, but that they delegate that power in enumerated ways to the government through a representative body. Our responsibilities as a nation are to secure the liberties of citizens and our posterity through the right laws, and lack thereof, so the fullest experience of freedom can be obtained by our citizens as they live in our country.

Two words come to mind when writing this: “social compact.” An example is our Constitution, which begins its preamble, “We the People …” That is the definition of a social compact in our country: “We,” the source of power and mobility of the government, have agreed on these terms to be governed and to govern ourselves.

Now the issue is this: Who can be a part of this agreement and receive the benefits of our nation? The No. 1 misconception, and I really do understand the compassionate nature of those who adhere to it, is that since America recognizes the equality and natural rights of all mankind, then all mankind has a right to be an American. The answer to that is a resounding no. “We the People” not only provide what our government should be by the ratification of the Constitution, but also who should be permitted to take part in it.

In Query VIII of Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he raises a specific point that is relevant today. He says in reference to our country, “Yet from such [absolute monarchies] we are to expect the greatest number of emigrants. They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth…. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. In proportion to their number, they will share with us the legislation [with the principles of the governments they left]. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass.”

As harsh as that seems to us now, it couldn’t be more on point. We have taken for granted that our system of government and recognition of freedoms are not commonplace throughout the world. As much as it pains some to hear it, our country is unique, not in the gloating way it has been portrayed to those against its principles; not because of its military might in times past, or economic muscle in the world market (in times past), but because of its form of government and its recognition of the freedoms of mankind.

In a letter to John Adams, then President George Washington stated on the mass migration of certain peoples into the U.S., “[W]hile the policy, or advantage of its taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for by so doing they retain the language, habits & principles (good or bad) which they bring with them …” The point being that since there is no other system like ours, which requires a different set of principles that cannot be acquired anywhere else, the intermingling of contrary politics being brought with said people will affect our way of government negatively — that same government that has the magnetism to bring people from the corners of the world due to its upholding of the liberties that are God-given.

I would like, in a further letter, to embellish upon the group of people that is in question to be allowed into our society, with all their presumptions and culture, that upon further inspection are the polar opposites of our form of government and what our country has deemed important in recent years.

Myles Goodwin

West Tisbury