In this same revolutionary spirit, the Constitution required congressmen to be paid, so that the office would not be limited to wealthy men. It required only a short residency for immigrants before they, too, became eligible to run for office. Delegates who argued for greater restriction faced immigrants like Hamilton, born in the West Indies, and James Wilson, born in Scotland, who wondered at the prospect of “his being incapacitated from holding a place under the very Constitution which he had shared in the trust of making.”
