When the Pilgrims made shore at Plymouth Rock, got their bearings and the men among them (women’s suffrage having to wait 300 years more) had signed the Mayflower Compact — in a sense the founding document of American democracy as the Magna Carta is of English democracy (that’s probably a notional stretch for both) —  you know who they found had gotten there first?

The discovered a people who called themselves the Wampanoags. They didn’t speak English. They spoke their own language but, being smart folks, they learned English because it became very clear the English settlers were not going to learn to speak Wampanoag.

So these first immigrants to what today is the State of Massachusetts brought with them the English language, as did those who preceded them by about a dozen years at Jamestown, Va., the first permanent English settlement in the present U.S. (where by the way in 1619, the same year the Pilgrims came ashore, the first African slave set foot in an English colony).

To the south not too many years later the Dutch established themselves at New Amsterdam, which when it changed hands in 1667 became New York (named for the Duke of York). Farther south some Swedes settled in what is now South Jersey — you can still find a place called Swedesboro in Gloucester County, N.J.

Had either of those non-English speaking colonies prevailed and the English ones failed, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., chief sponsor of the president’s favorite immigration bill, might very well be speaking Dutch or Swedish today. But of course that didn’t happen, English colonization prevailed and so we speak English today: And everyone who has come here in the centuries since not speaking English has had to learn it since (including all of my grandparents).

One of those who had to learn English was a young German from Kallstadt in Bavaria. He boarded ship in 1885 at the age of 16 to emigrate to the United States, arriving at the Castle Garden Emigrant Landing Depot in New York City (precursor to Ellis Island).

Various sources say the immigration authorities of the day listed him as Friedr. Trumpf and recorded his occupation as “None”. He moved in with an older sister and her husband, met a man who owned a barber shop, got hired and for the next six years worked as a barber.

If he had little education, no occupation, hardly any money, no offer of employment and no English when he arrived, then to his credit he learned the language, acquired a trade and prospered as millions before him had and as would tens of millions after who began in similar circumstances.

For these purposes we can fast forward to 1898 by when Trumpf had relocated to Washington State, become a citizen, made money in the restaurant business, relocated to Alaska — lured by the Klondike gold rush — and made his stake not by panning for gold but by operating a successful hotel named the Arctic for whose services most customers paid in gold dust.

The hotel’s guests included single women, who rented, besides rooms and beds, scales on which to weigh gold dust.

A contemporary article from the Yukon Sun  said this about the hotel: “For single men the Arctic has the best restaurant. But I would not advise respectable women to go there to sleep as they are liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings and uttered, too, by the depraved of their own sex.”

Well, putting aside that rather arch take on Trumpf’s hotel, one thing is apparent  — he gave the family an early start in the hotel business.

In 1901 at age 31, Trumpf returned to Kallstadt, there married a woman 11 years his junior and in 1902 and moved back to  New York City.  When his wife became homesick they returned to Bavaria. The long and short is German authorities concluded  Trumpf emigrated to America nearly 20 years before to avoid the mandatory army draft and ordered him expelled from Germany.

Last year, soon after his grandson’s election as president, The Washington Post and other news organizations reported a letter sent by Trumpf to Prince Luitipold of Bavaria beseeching reversal of the expulsion order. It did not get him a reversal and by 1905 the Trumpfs were back in New York where, in October that year, they had a son they named Frederick after his father. They called him Fred for short. In 1946 Fred and his wife in turn had a son, his second, who they named Donald.

That man,  now the occupant of the White House, is thus the grandson of a man who came to the U.S. at a young age with little education, no job training, very little money, no prospects, no job offer and no trade or skill.

According to one description of the immigration bill sponsored by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., which the occupant of the White House seized upon this week and elevated to   presidential immigration policy, today’s ideal immigrant “…would  be a 26-to-31-year-old with a US-based doctorate or professional degree, who speaks nearly perfect English and who has a salary offer that’s three times as high as the median income where they are (from).”

Friedr. Trumpf would not have fit that profile or come close to it. The Cotton bill, as we’ve all read, would require high proficiency in English for one to be admitted to the U.S. It would set up a scoring system that awards points for English fluency, advanced education, bringing big money to invest and the like. It even awards points for being an Olympic athlete or for winning a Nobel prize. We will have to give Friedr. Trumpf a pass on those last two because he arrived here before the first modern Olympiad in 1896 and before Alfred Nobel established his prizes.

Of course it is one thing to introduce a bill in the U.S. Senate but quite another to get it passed. In recent sessions of congress between the Senate and House of Representatives the number of bills introduced has ranged from 10,000  to 14,000. Typically 1 to 3 percent of  bills become law.  In the first six months of the current session over 6,000 bills were introduced. Fewer than 50 have passed — all but one or two like the Russia sanctions bill being innocuous.

The only progress made by Sen. Cotton’s bill is that he introduced it. A president can pull any of the thousands of bills introduced each year off the shelf to declare whatever he wants to with little likelihood of such a bill passing. You probably should not expect to hear much more of Sen. Cotton’s bill. It served  for a day as a distraction for a man who has no knowledge whatsoever of the long, complex history of American immigration laws.

Sen. Cotton’s bill may have been seized upon by this White House, but it isn’t going to become a law.  In fact it isn’t going to go anywhere except into the deepening mists of what is already shaping up to be the misshapen history of a misshapen administration.

In all the complicated history of immigration to America and the laws that have made the rules for it — yes, too often beset by the Xenophobia that is Sen. Cotton’s brand and is now peddled by  Friedr.  Trumpf’s grandson — it is safe to say  this:

It is safe to say that in the 240 years we have been a nation tens of millions of people  arrived  from everywhere else in the world with little education or none at all, with  few skills and no money, speaking but a few words of English or none at all, believing this is a fair and welcoming nation.

Mostly, they were right in that belief. Mostly, it still is.