RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sometimes the risk was to one’s life. About 25% of immigrants to Virginia in the 1620s died within a year. In the late 19th century, about 1 in 7 didn’t survive the trans-Atlantic voyage. Crossing the border illegally remains dangerous.

The first wave of immigration to the U.S. came between 1620, when the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth, Mass., and 1642, when the English Civil War began. About 25,000 Puritans, seeking to worship God in their own way, traveled to New England during those decades. The war brought the Puritan migration to a close, but other religious and ethnic groups, such as the Quakers and Huguenots, took up the slack in the late 17th century.

The Dutch came to New Amsterdam in the early 1600s to trade fur, tolerating all religions. New York has been America’s most commercially minded and religiously pluralistic city ever since.

The next wave of migration began in the mid-18th century, when Scots-Irish from Ulster began to immigrate in numbers. Many arrived in Philadelphia and made their way westward and then down the Appalachians, populating the Southern upcountry. Their descendants have formed the backbone of a number of populist movements, from Andrew Jackson to Donald Trump.

The American Revolution changed immigration patterns in two ways. First, German immigration increased markedly when many of the Hessian mercenaries Great Britain had hired to help put down the colonial rebellion decided to stay. Some deserted; others returned to Germany only long enough to collect their families and return. Second, Britain, which had transported between 50,000 and 120,000 criminals to the American colonies, could no longer do so. As a result it founded Australia in 1788.

Africans first appeared in Virginia in 1617 as indentured servants. But soon they were arriving as slaves, surviving an ordeal utterly beyond modern imagination and passing that strength down the generations.

Colonial immigration had been unrestricted. The first restriction of any kind came in 1808, when the federal government outlawed the slave trade. While this reduced that odious commerce, it continued illegally until the Civil War. Altogether about a million Africans were brought to the U.S. against their will.

The first mass migration after independence began in the 1840s when the Irish potato famine drove about one million Irish to the New World, many to New York and Boston. This in turn sparked the first major opposition to immigration. Until then, the U.S. had been an overwhelmingly Protestant country. Now Catholics were flooding in, many willing to work for extremely low wages. An anti-immigrant political party, remembered as the Know Nothings, did well enough in the 1850s to elect a speaker of the House.

Immigration largely ceased during the Civil War, but in the late 19th century one of history’s greatest migrations began. People from Southern and Eastern Europe poured in, often at the rate of more than a million a year. As with the Irish, this wave encountered major political resistance.

Chinese immigration to the West Coast was increasingly restricted until 1882, when the Chinese Exclusion Act banned it altogether. After World War I, the U.S. passed its first comprehensive immigration restrictions. A 1921 law installing country-specific quotas greatly restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe but left Western Europe inflows largely unchanged. Immigration from Latin America, however, was not restricted.

The Great Depression reversed the flow. For the first time more people emigrated from the U.S. than immigrated to it. Immigration was a mere 23,000 in 1933. But the return of prosperity brought renewed immigration—including of seasonal workers from Mexico. In 1954 the federal government began, with the cooperation of the Mexican government, a highly effective program to deport illegal Mexican workers. More than a million were deported in the first year of “Operation Wetback.”

In 1965, amid the civil rights revolution, the national origin quotas were abolished. This resulted in greatly increased immigration from non-European countries, once again changing the character of the American population. With the advent of cheap air travel, the nature of illegal immigration changed. Today many illegal immigrants are people who came into the country legally but overstayed their visas. Modern opposition to immigration is for the most part not to immigration per se, nor to particular ethnic groups, as it was in the past, but to the perception that illegal immigration has undermined the rule of law.

America’s prosperity, freedom and entrepreneurial spirit will always be a magnet for the ambitious and talented. It will remain one of the country’s greatest strengths. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. shouldn’t decide who gets to come in.

Mr. Gordon is author of “An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power.”