Fearing "importation of foreigners," Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on Virginia:

"They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, or if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as usual, from one extreme to the other. . . . In proportion to their number, they will infuse into it [the nation] their spirit, warp or bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass."