The federal government doesn't have any power that was not explicitly granted to it. You cannot infer any power from a clause in the constitution that restricts government power in some other area. Any act of Congress must be connected to an enumerated power in Article I.
Except the guys who wrote it thought that power was there, so the need to limit with one exception until 1808.
Which has nothing to do with what the Founders, themselves, wrote in the Constitution. They apparently thought the grant of power was somewhere, whether in the commerce clause or common defense clauses, they assumed the power was there.The border is merely a political line that determines over which area Congress has any authority. The presence of the line does not, itself, give Congress any particular power.
I'm trying to "find" nothing, I'm reading what they wrote, "Unless the english language no longer applies."You are attempting to find "intent" of a constitutional provision, which is not a typical method of constitutional construction. It is usually the original meaning that has any power. Trying to infer the intent of the large group of people who wrote the constitution is an exercise in futility. All that is relevant is the original public meaning of the words that were ultimately enacted--not the intent of the authors.
It would appear that the Founders "seized" that power for them when they were writing the Constitution.This post makes an interesting point, actually. I already knew that for most of the 19th century, immigration to the United States was basically unrestricted and unregulated. I never dug deeper into the methods by which Congress seized the power to regulate immigration at all. Perhaps I mistakenly assumed that it came from the overly broad and expansionary views of the commerce clause, which when combined with the necessary and proper clause, have been almost single-handedly responsible for the expansion of government over the last 70-80 years. If it is indeed true that Congress lacks any authority over restricting immigration, it'd make for an interesting court case to see how courts would wrestle with that.
Apparently the Founders didn't follow the idiot theory of government that if you don't write every jot and tittle of what was necessary to secure and maintain a nation then you couldn't do it. The Founders assumed their grants of power to Congress were not unlimited, but also not so narrow as to be ridiculous.I would imagine that securing the border (as in, assuring that the people who enter are not criminals or wanted) would be a legitimate exercise of commerce clause power. I'm not entirely convinced that it would follow that deciding who and how many non-criminals, non-terrorists, etc., would fall within that same clause.