Nationality law in the American Colonies

[5] Legislative bodies from both locations ultimately issued separate and sometimes conflicting naturalization laws, the interaction of which influenced early patterns of non-English immigration to the American colonies.

[6] Alternatively, aliens could seek royal denization, which was a more accessible path to permanent residency yet conferred a lesser form of citizenship than private naturalization.

[7] Religious prejudice, xenophobia and fears of foreign political views, as well as maintenance of an Englishman's superior commercial privileges, all contributed to a conservative approach to early naturalization law.

[12] In light of the Tory position, Parliament faced growing pressure from the colonies to open immigration to fulfill its major need, agrarian labor.

[15] In 1740 Parliament responded with a more liberal and enlightened policy[16] that greatly eased and broadened the ability of aliens in the American colonies to become naturalized subjects of Britain.

The Plantation Act 1740 supplanted the private naturalization process in which aliens in the colonies had to travel to London to appeal for subjectship on a costly, case-by-case basis.

[21] For example, Rhode Island, New York and Georgia each made it a deliberate and established part of their public policy to grant such rights to Jewish applicants, and became the colonies where Jews settled in the largest numbers.

[30] Even under the threat of parliamentary challenge, the colonies persisted in drafting local laws to fulfill their growing demand for new immigrants until those powers were completely proscribed in 1773.

[26] For example, in the early 1700s, Massachusetts required any ship entering its ports to provide a passenger list, and later prohibited the importation of poor, infirm or vicious people.

[37] Though the creditor class derided the policy, it made South Carolina a refuge for persons who had suffered under austere English debtor laws.

[34] New York in 1730 adopted a more accommodating naturalization process as the number of foreign Protestants within its borders reached a point of political importance and the colony sought to fulfill its ambitions of westward expansion.

[38] Pennsylvania in 1742 provided its own general law for naturalization that gave full rights to aliens who had resided in the colony for less than the seven years required in the Plantation Act 1740.

Such circumstances of life in the colonies allowed Americans to examine more closely the concept of allegiance, which played into the emerging belief in the equality of rights regardless of their origin.