How Mass Immigration Stopped American Socialism

Relatively open borders helped halt the early 20th Century welfare state.

- By Alex Nowr Asteh and Benja Min Powell

FOR CENTURIES, AMERICANS have worried that immigrants could overwhelm and negatively alter economic and political institutions in the United States. In 1783, at the end of the American War of Independence, even Thomas Jefferson had misgivings about too rapid an influx of immigrants, writing that they “will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty.” John Jay, the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and co-author of The Federalist Papers, thought that Catholicism was inimical to the principles of individual liberty and representative government, so he argued that the federal government should “erect a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics.” Prominent Federalist Party member Harrison Gray Otis said, “If some means are not adopted to prevent the indiscriminate admission of wild Irishmen and others to the right of suffrage, there will soon be an end to liberty and prosperity.”