In the wake of US president Donald Trump’s executive order barring and restricting refugees from several Muslim-majority countries, some Americans are unearthing past expressions of the country’s generosity to those fleeing the threat of violence abroad.

A letter from the country’s founding father to a refugee from another era is among the artifacts being shared on social media: In 1787, first US president George Washington wrote to the Dutch political revolutionary Francis Adrian Van der Kemp to welcome to him the United States. Van Der Kamp was one of 40,000 refugees who left the Netherlands after an unsuccessful political uprising.

Washington was touched by the plight of Van Der Kamp and his fellow refugees. He assured Van Der Kamp that the United States would be a place where those who have faced devastation might “settle themselves in comfort, freedom and ease.”

A portion of that letter is quoted below: