The Founders Lived Through—and Loved—High Immigration Rates

David J. Bier

Americans will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this month. One of the Declaration’s grievances with King George should resonate with Americans today: 

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.

Free legal immigration was a foundational American principle to the Founders, as I explore in more detail in Cato’s new book on the Declaration’s enduring legacy: A History of Repeated Injuries. All the major founders explicitly stated the desire for America to be an asylum for the masses of people of all religions and nations from around the world seeking freedom. It’s not just that they favored immigration. They established the freest immigration system in the world. My purpose in this post is to show that the Founders were not naïve. They had witnessed high rates of immigration firsthand and chose to expand that successful policy.

Legal Immigration Rates Were Higher in Colonial America

Since 1776, the United States has received about 130 million immigrants—a legacy that the Founders fully expected and would have welcomed. In absolute terms, permanent legal immigration has increased enormously. So far in 2026, the United States is on pace for about 884,000 new legal permanent residents, with probably about 400,000 of that coming from new arrivals. In FY 2025, the total number was closer to 1.3 million. The US population did not even reach 1.3 million until after 1750. By comparison, according to historian Aaron Fogleman, a total of 973,600 people—slave and free—entered the colonies or states in over a century from 1700 to 1809. 

But the better comparison is to compare the immigrant population to the population of the United States. The effect of 1.3 million people entering a country with only 1.3 million residents in a year would be quite different from that in a country with 340 million residents. The United States had an average annual legal immigration rate—as a share of the population—of about 0.9 percent from 1700 to 1770, including slaves, and about 0.5 percent excluding slaves. In FY 2026, the rate will likely be less than 0.3 percent, including people already in the United States who adjusted to legal permanent residence. Even in FY 2025, the legal immigration rate was less than 0.4 percent. 

Fogleman’s research, which combines a variety of sources, uses two approaches to estimate colonial immigration rates. The first is based on statistics on births and deaths, assuming the residual population increase is from immigrants, but the absence of complete records leaves a significant margin for error. The second is based on direct counting from both foreign and colonial port records. These records are incomplete, so they need substantial interpretation and extrapolation to obtain a full picture using that method. But both methods reinforce each other.

Fogleman’s research did not produce annual inflows, so from 1700 to 1782, I distributed the totals—slave and free—based on annual estimates for slave entries from the Voyages database. We would expect that slave and free traffic to correlate closely enough that it would not change the big picture for our purposes. Any other method would produce similarly high rates. Fogleman’s total slave entries were distributed based on the Voyages database through 1819, but for 1783 to 1819, annual free immigrant flows were based on the work of Hans-Jürgen Grabbe using immigrant arrivals in the Philadelphia area—the most important entry point during those years and the only one with quality records. Starting in 1820, official records were used for immigrant arrivals by ship.[1]

130 Million Immigrants Have Come to the United States

Of course, illegal immigration has also increased because the Immigration Act of 1924 closed the borders to most legal immigrants. Demographer Robert Warren of the Center for Migration Studies has published research on inflows of illegal immigrants.[2] Border Patrol arrests (available from 1925 to 2026) can be used to estimate earlier years, using Warren’s ratio of estimated inflow divided by Border Patrol arrests for 1990. 

Warren also estimated the number of illegal immigrants who adjusted their status to legal permanent residence, so we can subtract those from the total inflow to avoid double-counting, and we will use the ratio of illegal immigrant adjustments to total adjustments in 1995 to estimate the earlier numbers of illegal immigrant adjustments.[3] This methodology obviously has shortcomings, but it will give us a general idea of the earlier figures. 

Altogether, based on the available records, about 130 million immigrants have come to the United States in its history. Of these, 94 million obtained permanent residence in the United States since 1776. Another 35 million likely came, at least for a time, illegally without ever receiving permanent residence in the United States. Of these numbers, 50 million remain today—13.5 million illegally. 

The Immigrant Share Was Higher at the Founding Than it Is Today

Another way to look at immigration is to look at the share of the US population that is foreign-born. The first census to ask about birthplace or citizenship was the 1850 census. To calculate the pre-1850 immigrant population, there are two methods. Start with zero in 1607, adding immigrant inflows minus their deaths and returns, or start with 1850 and work backward. From 1850 to 1869, immigrant inflows were 4.9 million, and the immigrant population increased by 3.3 million, or 68 percent of the flow.[4] This percentage was used to estimate the effect of inflows on the immigrant population. 

For example, in the 1840s, 1.4 million immigrants came, and in this estimate, the immigrant population grew just under 1 million (68 percent). Then we can subtract this number to calculate the immigrant population in 1840 and divide by the known total US population to get the immigrant share. Under this methodology, the immigrant population share was falling throughout the 18th century from 45 percent in 1700, but it was still 17.5 percent of the population in 1776.

The alternative method starts in 1607 with the first immigrants to the colonies. Fogleman estimates that in addition to the numbers already discussed for the 18th century, 198,400 foreigners entered the United States from 1607 to 1699, including 33,200 slaves. Starting with zero in 1607, we can distribute them annually again using the Voyages data and add these arrivals to the immigrant population each year, assuming again that 68 percent survive. Under this method, the immigrant share was 45 percent of the population in 1700 and 16.8 percent of the population in 1776—nearly identical to the first methodology. 

Obviously, there is still great uncertainty with these estimates. For instance, the graph starts in 1630 because population estimates before then were very uncertain, and both methods produce results showing over 100 percent of the population being immigrants. Moreover, changing the death-emigration rate even a small amount can produce significantly different results. Nonetheless, this conclusion about the colonial immigrant share is robust. All other ways to deflate the immigrant population in 1776 create problems irreconcilable with the known facts, such as producing negative immigrants in the 1700s or too few immigrants in 1850.[5]

We also have complete records on the birthplace of members of Congress, and these records track the same pattern as my estimates of the immigrant share in 1776. Immigrants were 14 percent (8) of the 56 Declaration of Independence signers at the Second Continental Congress. The Constitutional Convention, which is not included below, had a similar percentage, 14.5 percent (8 of 55). The Constitution intentionally allowed immigrants to run for office, partly to encourage immigration to the United States, and the very first Congress under the new Constitution had the highest share of immigrants, 10 percent of members, in US history aside from the Continental Congress. Congress’s immigrant share is less than 4 percent today.

America at its Founding Was Diverse

Founding-era immigrants were ethnically and religiously diverse. The studies on this topic classify the population based on their names, and this methodology can only take you so far. The default is to classify someone as English, and anglicization of people’s names obscures their true ethnic origins. But no matter how you look at it, there were very substantial shares of the 1790 population who were not ethnically English or even British and from non-English-speaking countries or territories. 

Thanks to assimilation, we largely ignore the distinctions between these groups today, but that is not how it was felt at the time. Despite being relatively open to outsiders compared to other foreign powers, many English were still alarmed by the large numbers of Scots, Scotch-Irish, Irish, French, and other groups. Famously, Benjamin Franklin had concerns about the extent of German settlements in Pennsylvania in the 1750s, but as I note in my book chapter, by the 1780s, he was listing Germans among the many successful groups of poor people who had come to the United States. 

Although most blacks were slaves, about 9 percent were already free in 1790, with another 5 percent enslaved in states that would soon end slavery. Free blacks already composed 5 percent of the population in Delaware and 6 percent in Rhode Island in 1790. 

The ethnic diversity was matched by high levels of religious diversity for the time. The Founders rejected the closed system of religious tests for naturalization and for office. Among the delegates at the Second Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention were Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics, Dutch Reformed members, Baptists, Deists, and several who were raised Quakers but left to participate in politics. Again, modern Americans forget how significant those differences were at the time, but the Founders would have been acutely aware of Europe’s intra-Christian religious wars. But the tolerance of the Founders explicitly included non-Christian immigrants as well. 

The Founders did not stumble into a diverse, immigrant-heavy society by accident—they lived through it, debated it, and ultimately enshrined it in a Constitution that barred religious tests for office and left the door open to immigrants of every nation and faith. The immigration rate they experienced, the share of the population that was foreign-born, and the ethnic and religious composition of the founding generation all point to the same conclusion: America was never a homogeneous nation that only later became diverse through immigration. 

It was diverse and immigrant-heavy from the start, and the Founders—whatever anxieties individual figures voiced about one group or another—chose to build a system more open than any other in the world at the time. Two hundred and fifty years later, the debate over immigration continues, but it’s worth remembering that the level of openness we now call unprecedented was, for the Founders, normal.

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