My parents were immigrants, who fled a wartorn land to make a new life here.  So many people around us also were immigrants that our circle was mostly people born abroad, except for the kids (and not even all of us).   So, for our whole family,  we don’t have a problem around the value of immigrants.  To me, immigration – restless mobility, hunting for a decent life – seems hard-wired into human nature.

Yet somehow, here we are in an awful hostile mess, and we all know it.  If you put the quote “our current immigration system is broken” into Google, you get 158,000 results.  If you leave off the quote marks, you get 27,700,000 results.

As a touchstone to this whole bucket of hysteria, let’s try to remember that human life did not originate in the Americas.  The ancestors of every human being in the Americas came from another part of the planet.   We’re all immigrants here.  It says so much about America today that we can’t get past this.

The earlier inhabitants of the continent might have a different spin on this whole anti-immigration thing – seems to me they would be the ones with a legitimate beef about the newcomers.