This sounds right to me but all my James Madison and Thomas Jefferson -fu seems to be failing me. Can we get a citation here for their intent? I'm getting some quotes that indicate they were worried about majority vs. minority stuff, but nothing with any international flair (and, of course, America is a minority of the world, so it doesn't quite pack the punch I would enjoy).
EDIT: I am concerned, the further I go in this search, that the reason they seem not to speak of the rights of foreigners as inalienable may be because e.g. so many foreigners are black or Chinese, and you didn't even get a rights guarantee back then if you were American-born and black or Chinese (not that there were a lot of Chinese people there at the time -- burning down their houses and threatening to kill them if they didn't leave comes later in American history, with similar problems for Japanese people even _later_ in American history), so there was just no chance anyone would even possibly consider the hilarious joke that we'd give rights guarantees to foreigners.
Could be off-base, but the context back then was... decidedly less progressive than we'd like to imagine them now.
The Constitution applies to the government, it is a white list (to use a racist term, ;) to say what the government CAN do. Not that we follow it any more. The government doesn't _allow_ us to do things, it is quite the opposite.
EDIT: I am concerned, the further I go in this search, that the reason they seem not to speak of the rights of foreigners as inalienable may be because e.g. so many foreigners are black or Chinese, and you didn't even get a rights guarantee back then if you were American-born and black or Chinese (not that there were a lot of Chinese people there at the time -- burning down their houses and threatening to kill them if they didn't leave comes later in American history, with similar problems for Japanese people even _later_ in American history), so there was just no chance anyone would even possibly consider the hilarious joke that we'd give rights guarantees to foreigners.
Could be off-base, but the context back then was... decidedly less progressive than we'd like to imagine them now.