512
Rehnquist, C. J., dissenting
free interstate passage of citizens. The state law in Edwards v. California, 314 U. S. 160 (1941), which prohibited the transport of any indigent person into California, was a classic barrier to travel or migration and the Court rightly struck it down. Indeed, for most of this country's history, what the Court today calls the first "component" of the right to travel, ante, at 500, was the entirety of this right. As Chief Justice Taney stated in his dissent in the Passenger Cases, 7 How. 283 (1849):
"We are all citizens of the United States; and, as members of the same community, must have the right to pass and repass through every part of it without interruption, as freely as in our own States. And a tax imposed by a State for entering its territories or harbours is inconsistent with the rights which belong to the citizens of other States as members of the Union, and with the objects which that Union was intended to attain. Such a power in the States could produce nothing but discord and mutual irritation, and they very clearly do not possess it." Id., at 492.
See also Crandall v. Nevada, 6 Wall. 35, 44 (1868); Williams v. Fears, 179 U. S. 270, 274 (1900); Memorial Hospital v. Maricopa County, 415 U. S. 250, 280-283 (1974) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting) (collecting and discussing cases). The Court wisely holds that because Cal. Welf. & Inst. Code Ann. § 11450.03 (West Supp. 1999) imposes no obstacle to respondents' entry into California, the statute does not infringe upon the right to travel. See ante, at 501. Thus, the traditional conception of the right to travel is simply not an issue in this case.
I also have no difficulty with aligning the right to travel with the protections afforded by the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV, § 2, to nonresidents who enter other States "intending to return home at the end of [their] journey." See ante, at 501. Nonresident visitors of other
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