STEVE SAILER: Benjamin Franklin’s American Dream.

Franklin had become interested in immigration reduction because of two abuses that may seem familiar today. First, the British government was dumping convicts on the colonies, and these poor-quality immigrants raised the crime rate.

The institutional background of the second is more abstruse, but the injustice Franklin perceived is even more familiar at the moment. Just as the current government is attempting to elect a new people, so, too, were Franklin’s political adversaries. By 1751, the Province of Pennsylvania had become an uneasy hybrid of ownership by the absentee landlords resident in England (the heirs of William Penn) and middle-class self-government. The hereditary proprietors attempted to tip the balance against Franklin’s local-rule party by recruiting immigrants in Germany, who upon arrival in Pennsylvania voted en bloc for the owners.