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.”