Even before there was a Constitution, there was foreign investment in the United States. At the very beginning, like any new and emerging nation, this was a land of great potential and little cash. The men on Wall Street, then as now, were hungry for capital to flow so that they could slice off a piece of the action for themselves. And even then, there was a vague, ill-defined suspicion of foreign money — a fear of the absentee landlord, of alien influence on our government.

Without exaggeration, the most important foreign investment in the United States is the British Petroleum Company Ltd.'s Alaskan holdings involving the ownership of almost half of the Trans Alaska Pipeline and more than half of the oil in the rich Prudhoe Bay field containing upwards of 40 percent of the entire nation's proven oil reserves. And, the British government owns roughly 70 percent of British Petroleum.

Everything that is attractive about foreign investment is present in the Japanese mini steel mill now under construction in Auburn, N.Y.: a new industry, new jobs, new capital, and the prospect of stimulating the American steel industry with competition and techniques designed to multiply productivity.

Charles W. Robinson, the Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, returned from Moscow a few weeks ago with a five-year plan to sell American wheat to the Soviet Union. Missing from his porfolio was a hoped for parallel contract binding the Russians to provide oil to the United States at a cut rate price low enough to devastate the cool of the OPEC cartel.

Whenever the United Nations General Assembly has met in recent years, heads of state, foreign ministers and others with the power to spend the fabled piles of petrodollars have gathered from remote parts of the Middle East into easily-accessible New York City.

Two years ago, investment banker Richard Nelson was engaged in the dance of the "Daisy Chain Flakes", which is his term for those who go through the ritual of trying to sell General Motors or any of the other super-corporations on the Fortune 500 list to the Arabs in exchange for a pile of their petrodollars.

Frank Hawkinson had just turned 41 in 1973, the critical age for so many men in American society, often provoking them to change the direction of their lives in acting out the nation's mythological dream of standing alone and independent. Hawkinson chose as his medium the publication of a newsletter on foreign investment in the United States.

Kutayba Alghanim is a man of pragmatic ideas who has skillfully molded a large Kuwaiti family trading company into a modern corporation which he is currently reshaping into a multi-national business complex.

JEDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA — Tarek Bin Laden is the personification of the dichotomy of Saudi Arabia: conservatism and change mingle in his being.

Sitting on a camp chair, snug against the edge of an open shaft — a plunge of four stories — Tarek, with an expression reflecting the seriousness of concentration, watched his Yemeni construction workers pouring a concrete slab for his 18-story, apartment-office building complex just behind the Kandara Palace Hotel. The Yemenis hustled around as employees usually do under the eyes of their boss.

The Pahlavi Foundation's high rise building, under construction at 650 Fifth Avenue in New York City, would seem at first glance to be a symbolic investment in America, since the Iranians starting with a fanfare of great intentions for their bundles of petrodollars have invested so little directly into the United States.

The opening of the unique UBAF Arab American Bank on New York City's Park Avenue this June represents the first thrust of Pan-Arab investment into the United States.

ROTTERDAM — A colloquial American version of Cervantes words would be: "Don't put your eggs all in one basket." I began to feel this must be the corporate motto of Pakhoed Holding N.V., the Dutch multi-national holding company, as I spoke to executives of the firm's separate divisions about their plans for expansion into the United States.