on board a
vessel, and brought them to Mount Holly to sell." Isaac Weld, traveling in
the United States in the last decade of the eighteenth century, noted
methods of securing aliens in the town of York, Pennsylvania: "The
inhabitants of this town as well as those of Lancaster and the adjoining
country consist principally 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 o