If you know history—worse, if you teach it, which steers you into confrontations you don’t want—your tolerance for ignorance dissipates. This quote is a favorite of ignorant people.

Of course your ancestors came here the “right way,” especially if they came between 1880 and 1914. We had another ten years before we would subdue the first immigrants—the Lakota people—at Wounded Knee, and we still had a vast continent to fill once we’d accomplished the extermination, or near-exterminations, that we’d always glorified, from Puritan sermons to the the pronouncements of the first governor of California to breathless newspaper dispatches from the Black Hills, and its gold deposits, in the 1870s.

So your ancestors—Italians, Poles, Russian Jews, Bohemians. Irish and the largest immirant group, Germans–were needed to fill the empty space in this map. Their influence remains: In Texas, there are many little towns where “Texas German,” is the second language. Missouri River towns have names like Versailles, Vichy, Hermann. In my hometown, Arroyo Grande, Califronia, what is now Cherry Avenue was dense with Bohemian families.

We were starved for people. Unless, of course, to use a few examples, you were Chinese (denied with the Exclusion Act), Japanese (The “Gentleman’s Agreement”) or Filipino (citizens and then, on a Congressional whim, not citizens. Filipinas were not allowed to come to America.)

“Illegal Aliens” are driven by the same desires that motivated Italians, Russian Jews or the Irish: poverty, persecution, starvation. But not even the “coffin ships” that claimed so many Irish immigrants can compare to the agonizing deaths in our Desert Southwest today.

The great irony is that we are as starved for people now as we were in 1880. The vastness now is not calculated in land, but in the passing of Americans from my generation—the so-called” Boomers”—who, liked the migrants, leave nothing behind when they die: the American birth rate in 2023 was half that of 1957, in the midst of the Baby Boom. And the Boomers are retiring—or dying—so it’s we account who for the gap today, generational rather than geographical, that so closely resembles the emptiness between the Mississippi and the Pacific in 1880.

But these people are not welcomed, ostensibly because they came here the “wrong way.” They came here because death squads killed friends or family members, because climate change has reduced fields of corn to crisp rows resembling papyrus, because there are no jobs for young people in bifurcated economies marked by the vast divide between landowning elites and landless farmworkers.

What would you do in the same circumstances? Illuminate me.