Is there a national soul that accepts immigrants fleeing wretched conditions in their home countries?
Or has the surge of refugees at our southern border created so much fear that most, if not all, Americans have simply turned their back on welcoming people from other lands?
Two questions only touched lightly in public opinion polls and yet tied together by the political reality that immigration attitudes will figure in the outcome of the November presidential election.
The U.S. has long been a melting pot nation, but angry voices have changed public sentiment, fueled by political lies that migrants who enter the country illegally represent mostly violent criminals, drug dealers and other undesirables.
Former President Trump makes no apology for describing them as subhuman — “vermin” and “animals” — who have escaped from prisons and asylums to ravage America.
Immigration officials reject Trump’s character assassination. They say the large majority of undocumented refugees are families and children fleeing war, violence and dire poverty in their home countries.
Trump promises, if elected president again, mass deportation of the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants in the country, including the 580,000 DACA residents brought in as young children by their parents and now blended into our multiracial society as students, workers and taxpayers.
It is frightening and rife with legal complexities.
Still, constant encounters with thousands of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border is a crisis in need of prompt solutions and long-term immigration law reforms.
The Border Patrol needs more human and technology resources to strengthen border security. Mexico needs to step up efforts to discourage migrant caravans and border encampments. It also needs to allow, on its side of the border, the sorting of valid asylum claims from the invalid.
The party-before-country Congress has failed to help. Bipartisan legislation to bolster border security did not survive Trump, who convinced sycophant Republicans to scuttle the measure.
Trump sees immigration outrage as “Biden’s border bloodbath” — a phrase he coined last week. He considers immigration a huge plus for his presidential campaign, a game changer.
That’s why he’s spinning the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, 22, police say by a Venezuelan immigrant, as an indictment of all undocumented immigrants in the country.
He also stoked public angst at a campaign event last week in Grand Rapids, Michigan, referring to Ruby Garcia, 25, a local woman who police say was shot dead by her boyfriend, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico.
Trump said he “spoke to some of the (victim’s) family” who told him she was a “beautiful young woman who was savagely murdered by an illegal alien criminal.”
But Garcia’s sister, Mavi Garcia, said his reference to the family wasn’t true. She chastised Trump for making a false statement on national TV when “he did not talk with any of us.”
Then she added: “It’s always about illegal immigrants. Nobody really speaks about when Americans do heinous crimes, and it is kind of shocking that he would just bring up illegals.”
If the majority of voters are comfortable with Trump’s scornful immigration language and his heartless solution of mass deportations, Trump may be right that his strategy is a campaign winner.
It adds another grim notch to his political legacy. And also scars the national soul as expressed to the world on New York Harbor’s Statue of Liberty inscription:
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”