Speech #710028806

Our friend from Virginia linked the presence of aliens in this country to "a splinter in the hand. a cinder in the eye. indeed. any foreign substance in the human body Is liable to create irritation. friction. distress. and swelling. and so forth." He continued that any other interpretation would "admit aliens to a large influence in the Government of the United States." and as an illustration of his theory he stated that if two districts had each 500.000 people and one of them consisted wholly of American citizens and the other was equally divided between citizens and aliens. that the latter " would have double power over the other district." I challenge the soundness of both premises. They seem to me without justification in fact. Taking his first premise. long before the Constitution was adopted. there bad already set in a great tide of immigration to this country. Especially in the Middle States there were many aliens. When the Constitution was adopted aliens were! very welcome in this country. It was then recoguized that its future greatnesswould depend to some extent upon migration to this country.. The American people were then not as sensitive about aliens as they are now. for they all recognized that all of them were the descendants of men who werQ once aliens. One of the counts against George III in the Declaration of Independence was this: He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States . for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners and refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither. In many of the Colonies there were the most liberal provisions with respect to aliens. Thus in Massachusetts no length of residence was -tequired and in others only an oath of ale-. glance. while in others any permanent residence qualified a man to vote if lie was a freeholder. Pennsylvania especially had a heterogeneous population. Its chief city was then the true cosmopolitan city of thecountry. Recognizing the existence of many aliens in America. the naturalization laws of Pennsylvania were so liberal that any alien who had resided In Pennsylvania for one year and owned real estate was made ipso facto a citizen and accorded all the rights of such. The Constitution itself recognizes the necessity of naturalization in more than one passage. Thus the framers of the Constitution could not have been ignorant of the fact that there were then many aliens in the United States and that many more were to come. and it is a plausible conjecture that. because they were truly a part of the population. subject to the laws of the country. they used the word "persons" in describing whom should be enumerated. Equally without foundation is the second premise that to include aliens In the population is to give them an undue influence in the councils of the Nation. for that ignores the basic theory of representative government.