Keywords
political philosophy
Declaration of Independence
American founding
American government.
How to Cite
Abstract
The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, and immigration policy has always been controversial. The history of immigration in the United States is contrasted in this article with a normative standard of naturalization (immigration policy) based on the Declaration of Independence. The current immigration debate fits within a historical pattern that pits an unrestricted right of immigration (the left) against exclusive, provincial politics (the right). Both sides are simultaneously correct and incorrect. A moderate policy on immigration is possible if the debate in the United States gets an infusion of what Thomas Paine called "common sense".Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
Copyright Retention and License Grant:
Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal a non-exclusive right of first publication. The work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits others to share and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes, provided they give appropriate credit to the author and acknowledge the work’s initial publication in this journal.
Additional Distribution: Authors are free to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., posting to an institutional repository, publishing in a book, or other distribution), provided they acknowledge the work’s initial publication in this journal.
Pre- and Post-Publication Sharing: Authors are permitted and encouraged to share their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories, personal websites, or academic platforms) before, during, or after the submission process, as this can foster productive exchanges and increase the visibility and citation of the published work, subject to the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.