Among other many cultural impacts, the musical Hamilton, which officially debuted on Broadway a decade ago, gave us the often-repeated phrase “immigrants, they get the job done.” The show made Alexander Hamilton an avatar for generations of people from around the world “comin’ up from the bottom” who contributed to making the United States a better nation. But, as historian Phillip W. Magness writes, the real story of Hamilton’s relationship with foreignness is considerably more complicated.

First of all, Magness writes, Hamilton wasn’t technically an immigrant at all. Born inside the British Empire on the Caribbean island of Nevis, his journey to the British colony of New York made him an internal migrant within the empire.

At one point in his political career, Hamilton did support liberal immigration policies. As Secretary of the Treasury in 1791, he proposed actively recruiting artists and manufacturers and generally trying to increase the country’s population through immigration.

But, over time, his Federalist Party took an increasingly xenophobic stance. They lashed out at Jeffersonians who supported the French Revolution and alleged that foreign-born people represented a security threat. In 1798, the Federalist-dominated Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which—in addition to allowing the censorship of critics of the John Adams administration—curtailed the rights of immigrants. It increased the waiting time for new US residents to become citizens to fourteen years and allowed for the imprisonment or deportation of noncitizens from a country at war with the US—or those deemed “hostile” to the nation.

The biography of Hamilton by Ron Chernow that formed the source material for the musical suggests that Hamilton was a reluctant supporter of the Alien and Sedition Acts. However, Magness argues that Hamilton pushed for the anti-immigrant measures and, after they were passed, complained that not enough deportations were taking place. In one letter, Hamilton wrote of his desire to see two foreign-born anti-Federalist newspaper editors expelled from the country. (One was the Scotsman James T. Calendar, who had publicized Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds.)

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Hamilton also lashed out at political enemies who were foreign-born, suggesting that they lacked loyalty to their adopted country. Some of them pointed to the hypocrisy here, given his own origins.

In the first years of the 1800s, Hamilton argued for the maintenance of limits to immigration, claiming that, while immigration had benefited the nation in earlier decades, there were now enough Americans. In an 1801 pseudonymous newspaper editorial, he argued that the “experience of all ages” warns against “admitting foreigners to an immediate and unreserved participation in the right of suffrage.” He even attributed the fall of Rome to the extension of Roman citizenship to other Italians.

As it turned out, the restrictions were reversed and US immigration laws remained quite permissive until the anti-Chinese legislation of the 1870s. But it was no thanks to Hamilton.

“By the end of his life, his political beliefs actually placed him among the leading advocates of immigration restrictions in the Founding generation,” Magness writes.

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