As news reports proliferate of multimillion-dollar — and possibly billion-dollar — fraudulent diversions of government funds involving Minnesota’s Somali immigrant community, it may be time at one year’s end and the next one’s beginning to take a longer look at America’s experience with immigration, and to seek the guidance of the first and one of its two greatest presidents. 

The Founding Fathers were aware that their new nation was gifted with vast acreage, but only 4 million people were counted in the first decennial Census in 1790. The Constitution’s first words, drafted by the gifted wordsmith Gouverneur Morris, stated that its authority came from “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common Defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” 

There is a tension in these words: the new federal government is designed to guarantee liberty but also to “insure” tranquility, all for the existing citizenry and for their descendants. But not just for them. Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 grants Congress the power “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization … throughout the United States.” 

Leave aside, for a moment, current controversies over whether and how the federal government can prevent the states from obstructing the enforcement of federal immigration laws. The larger point is that the Framers envisioned that it was possible and desirable that foreign migrants enter the U.S. and, under specified terms and conditions, become full citizens.

This was inconsistent with British and European ideas, which envisioned that people born within a kingdom would remain subjects of its monarch for life. This was the basis on which the British impressed American seamen,........

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