The thing is and this is why I laugh my ass off when white supremacists say “WE SHOULD UNITE OVER OUR COMMON WHITENESS” and it’s like uh your ideological ancestors were the same ones saying my family really wasn’t “white” because they were the wrong religion, ethnic background, and didn’t look “Western.” Not that I would join up with white supremacists anyhow since I think racial superiority is an absurd construct but it’s really funny when white supremacists want me to forget that they were the ones who told my mom’s grandparents that they didn’t belong in this country or my Dad’s that their Catholic faith meant that electing one of them would mean they would side with the Pope over secular means. Besides I subscribe to the notion that we’ve all been a newcomer at one point so why not welcome people who WANT to be here. Why not welcome people whose children will grow up loving this country and serving it in some way. When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in the late 30’s and when the original “America Firsters” could have cared less about Hitler, my grandmother’s cousin enlisted in the Marines. He ended up planting the flag on Iwo Jima with five other guys including a Native American named Ira Hayes. Ira admired cousin Mike. Ira’s family had been in the US for generations in Arizona and Mike had arrived as a boy but they respected each other and didn’t see one as inferior to the other. That’s how it should be. America is not about a race or ethnicity. It’s about wanting to belong. And that’s something Nativists have never gotten about this country whether they were bellyaching about the Irish in the Famine years or today complaining about asylum seekers.