Glaucous蒼

if you were church —

I'd get on my knees

It's summed up nicely in the first essay of Historians on Hamilton:

"He [Chernow] is referring to an ethos in which the culture of the United States, usually against the will of hidebound earlier arrivers, is invigorated by the contributions of outsiders. No such ethos existed, and there was no United States in which such an ethos might have thrived, in the late eighteenth century when Hamilton, a citizen of the empire, moved from one of that empire's colonies, the British West Indies, to another of its colonies, New York."

The melting pot is a very modern concept, and resistance to immigration (as a general thing, rather than to specific ethnic groups) is a much more modern phenomenon that one might assume. Nor were the Caribbean islands then seen the same way they are now. Then, they were a source of massive wealth that Britain prized far above the North American colonies that it had spent so much to protect during the Seven Years' War. One of the reasons the French supported the American Revolution was in the hope of prising those islands out of British hands - an expensive gamble that led directly to France's own revolution.

The essay goes on to point out that "Hamilton was hardly alone among his peers in coming from disadvantage, being put to work at an early age, or being born outside North America". It points out that Robert Morris, 'the financier of the revolution', was born in utter poverty in England. Henry Knox was abandoned by his father and had to go to work at twelve to support not just himself but his family.