of Dutch and German immigrants and their descendants.  Great numbers of these people emigrate to America every year and the importation of them forms a very considerable branch of commerce.  They are for the most part brought from the Hanse towns and Rotterdam.  The vessels sail thither from America laden with different kinds of produce and the masters of them on arriving there entice as many of these people on board as they can persuade to leave their native country, without demanding any money for their passages.  When the vessel arrives in America an advertisement is put into the paper mentioning the different kinds of people on board whether smiths, tailors, carpenters, laborers, or the like and the people that are in want of such men flock down to the vessel.  These poor Germans are then sold to the highest bidder and the captain of the vessel or the ship holder puts the money into his pocket.”

These may be, it is true, extreme cases of the economic motive for immigration.  But they are quite in line with eighteenth century Mercantilist economic philosophy.  Josiah Tucker, for example, in his Essay on Trade, 1753, urges the encouragement of immigration from France, and cites the value of Huguenot refugees.  “Great was the outcry against them at their first coming.  Poor England would be ruined!  Foreigners encouraged!  And our own people starving!  This was the popular cry of the times.  But the looms in Spittle-Fields, and the shops on Ludgate-Hill have at last sufficiently taught us another lesson ... these Hugonots have ... partly got, and partly saved, in the space of fifty years, a balance in our favour of, at least, fifty millions sterling....  And as England and France are rivals to each other, and competitors in almost all branches of commerce, every single manufacturer so coming over, would be our gain, and a double loss to France.”

The obverse side of the case appears in British hindrances to the free emigration of artisans during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  Laws forbade any British subject who had been employed in the manufacture of wool, cotton, iron, brass, steel, or any other metal, of clocks, watches, etc., or who might come under the general denomination of artificer or manufacturer, to leave his own country for the purpose of residing in a foreign country out of the dominion of His Britannic Majesty.  Recall the difficulty early American manufacturers encountered in introducing new English improvements in cotton manufacture; a virtual embargo was laid upon the migration of either men or machinery.  Recall, too, an expression of American resentment in our Declaration of Independence at this English attitude:  “He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose, obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.”