The provision of the Constitution that "the migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper and admit shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year 1808" has, of course, become obsolete.

With respect to the immigration of persons into the United States, the authority of the United States is exclusive as regards its commerce power, or its control of foreign relations. The States may not levy a tax on persons entering the United States, such a tax not being relieved from the constitutional objection that it is -an interference with commerce by describing it in its title as in aid of an inspection law which authorizes immigrants to be inspected with reference to their being criminals, paupers, lunatics, or persons liable to become a public charge. Inspection laws and the words "imports" and "exports," the Supreme Court has declared have reference to property and not to persons.2 of local application. Upon the other hand, when the Constitution declares that all duties shall be uniform 'throughout the United States' it becomes necessary to inquire whether there be any territory over which Congress has jurisdiction which is not a part of the 'United States,' by which term we understand the States whose people united to form the Constitution, and such as have since been admitted to the Union upon an equality with them. . . . We suggest, without intending to decide, that there may be a distinction between certain natural rights enforced in the Constitution by prohibitions against interference with them, and what may be termed artificial or remedial rights which are peculiar to our own system of jurisprudence. Of the former class are the rights to one's own religious opinions and to a public expression of them, or, as sometimes said, to worship God according to the dictates of one's own conscience; the right to personal liberty and individual property; to freedom of speech and of the press; to free access to courts of justice, to due process of law, and to an equal protection of the laws; to immunities from unreasonable searches and seizures, as well as cruel and unusual punishments; and to such other immunities as are indispensable to a free government. Of the latter class are the rights to citizenship, suffrage (Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. 162; 22 L. ed. 627), and to the particular methods of procedure pointed out in the Constitution, which are peculiar to Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, and some of which have already been held by the States to be unnecessary to the proper protection of individuals."Justice Brown in Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U. S. 244: 21 Sup. Ct. Rep. 770; 45 L. ed. 1088.

2 New York v. Compagnie Generale Transatlantique, 107 U. S. 59; 2 Sup. Ct. Rep. 87; 27 L. ed. 383.