Bonds protect national fiscal order

A bond requirement is not, in principle, foreign to sound public finance — sponsors have long been asked to demonstrate that a newcomer will not become a public charge, and fiscal responsibility is a legitimate government interest. But I must be direct about the distinction that matters here: a bond designed to ensure an immigrant meets basic civic obligations is defensible; a bond set so high that it functions as a price of admission is something else entirely. One hundred thousand dollars is not a guarantee of good faith — it is a gate that shuts out the skilled artisan, the industrious laborer, the future manufacturer, the very sort of energetic worker who built American productive capacity from the ground up. I have argued since my first Report on Manufactures that industry and enterprise are the engines of national wealth, and those engines are fed by ambitious people of modest means. Set the bond to secure accountability; do not set it to auction citizenship to the highest bidder.

Wealth tests corrupt republican citizenship

A republic that sells civic membership to the highest bidder has already surrendered the principle that membership rests on. The Declaration does not say that all *wealthy* men are created equal — it says all persons are, and from that premise flows every just claim to liberty and belonging. When a government prices permanent residency at one hundred thousand dollars, it does not screen for self-sufficiency; it screens for inherited fortune, for the accident of birth into means, and it shuts the gate against precisely the kind of industrious, land-tending, labor-honoring newcomer who has always renewed the Republic's vigor. I have long distrusted concentrated power, but I distrust equally any mechanism that converts a civic status into a commodity, because commerce and liberty operate by different logics — one rewards capital, the other must remain indifferent to it. A wealth test is not a policy of self-sufficiency; it is an aristocratic turnstile dressed in republican clothing.

Congress alone must set membership terms

The Constitution assigns to Congress, not to the executive, the power to establish a uniform rule of naturalization — Article I, Section 8 makes that compact explicit. When an administration imposes a $100,000 bond requirement by policy rather than by statute, it does not merely restrict immigration; it usurps the legislative function, substituting executive preference for the deliberate judgment of the branch designed to represent the whole people. The danger here is structural before it is humanitarian. A government that can price civic membership by decree can, by the same logic, price any right it pleases — speech, assembly, the free exercise of conscience — and always with a plausible fiscal justification ready at hand. I do not argue that Congress may not set financial conditions; it may, by law, after debate and public accountability. I argue only that the mechanism matters as much as the measure. Power exercised outside its proper channel does not become legitimate simply because the outcome satisfies the faction presently in office.