Honest opinion about government from Walter Berns:
[O]n this foundation [natural law] we built not only a nation of immigrants, but a nation of immigrants from every part of the globe. In the words of the old Book of Common Prayer, we became and remain a haven for "all sorts and conditions of men."
This is not to deny that our laws have sometimes been biased or our citizens prejudiced; it is merely to say, what is surely true, that in no other place is a prejudice against foreigners so inappropriate, so foreign, so difficult to justify. Xenophobia is, to use another term for which there is no analogue elsewhere, un-American. Precisely because America is something other than a place and a tradition, because words constitute the principal bond between us, anyone (in principle) may become an American. He has only to be Americanized, and, as I say, all sorts and conditions of men have been able and willing to do that.
Taking the Constitution Seriously, 1987
Walter Berns has been a Rockefeller Fellow, a Fulbright Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Phi Beta Kappa lecturer, a winner of the Clark Distinguished Teaching Award (Cornell University), and a member of the Council of Scholars in the Library of Congress. His books include The First Amendment and the Future of American Democracy (1985), For Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the Death Penalty (1991), and Taking the Constitution Seriously (1987).
Quotation and short bio from The Quotable Conservative: The Giants of Conservatism on Liberty, Freedom, Individual Responsibility, and Traditional Values. Rod L. Evans and Irwin M. Berent, editors. Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Publishing, 1996.