Immigration Debate Raged Even During Jefferson's Time

The Problem:

The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice; and on the love of country, which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family. The opinion advanced in [Jefferson’s] Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that:

1. Foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners.

2. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism?…

The Solution:

In the recommendation to admit indiscriminately foreign emigrants of every description to the privileges of American citizens, on their first entrance into our country, there is an attempt to break down every pale which has been erected for the preservation of a national spirit and a national character; and to let in the most powerful means of perverting and corrupting both the one and the other.

[From Hamilton, “The Examination,” nos. 7-9 (1802), Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961-), 25:491-501.]

Our forefathers understood the problem very well. Knowing that all were immigrants or descendants of immigrants, they weren't adverse to immigration: only to admitting those that would harm the United States and to allowing immigrants to operate willy nilly throughout the landscape.

Nothing has changed except that we have forgotten the solution to the immigration problems that are presently engulfing us: immigrants won't give up their long-practiced behaviors and ways of thinking unless they are obligated to do so.