John Quincy Adams on Immigration, 1820
H/T: Marsha Enright, Gulch Scholar
so many great pull-quotes, but this one I found most interesting:
"We expect therefore very few, if any transplanted countrymen from classes of people who enjoy happiness, ease, or even comfort, in their native climes. The happy and contented remain at home, and it requires an impulse, at least as keen as that of urgent want, to drive a man from the soil of his nativity and the land of his father’s sepulchres. Of the very few emigrants of more fortunate classes, who ever make the attempt of settling in this country, a principal proportion sicken at the strangeness of our manners, and after a residence, more or less protracted, return to the countries whence they came."
so many great pull-quotes, but this one I found most interesting:
"We expect therefore very few, if any transplanted countrymen from classes of people who enjoy happiness, ease, or even comfort, in their native climes. The happy and contented remain at home, and it requires an impulse, at least as keen as that of urgent want, to drive a man from the soil of his nativity and the land of his father’s sepulchres. Of the very few emigrants of more fortunate classes, who ever make the attempt of settling in this country, a principal proportion sicken at the strangeness of our manners, and after a residence, more or less protracted, return to the countries whence they came."
But it is real concern that it can no longer happen...
part of the reason would be -
"made it to NYC, found a job, became a citizen"
I think today you would not even be allowed in, or perhaps soon deported.
I hope that when it comes to immigration we can, with a few caveats, return to what was rather than what is.
It has been many years since reading any of JQA's writings. Intriguing indeed.
My point is that these are increasingly fewer and farther between, especially within the hordes which have come from South America. I see this every day unfortunately