‘Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?’

In the mid-19th century, over one million people fled Ireland, a dirt-poor, famine-stricken colonial outpost. Many of them landed here, in America. At first reviled for their alien religion and foreign ways, they eventually integrated fully into American society, whilst gifting their new home F. Scott Fitzgerald, JFK, and St. Patrick’s Day.

From 1880 to 1915, 13 million people sailed from Italy, a recently unified state wracked by political and economic turmoil. Four million of them passed through Ellis Island and took up residence in cramped tenements, all the while suffering taunts and slurs for generations. Nowadays, there are fewer dishes more American than spaghetti with meatballs.

Following the passage of landmark immigration reform in 1965, ethnic quotas were abolished and migrants poured into the U.S. from across Asia and Latin America. The United States, to our shame, has yet to widen the American identity to fully encapsulate these peoples. But nonetheless, the waves of hopeful migration have continued unabated.

By 2000, over a million people had reached our shores from India, an overcrowded and chaotic nation feeling its way through newfound independence. Their children now make us laugh until we cry — think Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling, Hasan Minhaj. Since the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of people from an impoverished island country called the Dominican Republic took wing to the mainland in search of a better life. Counted among them are some of the best baseball players to take the field in the last 20 years — Pedro Martinez, David Ortiz, and Albert Pujols.

From sports to politics, cuisine to the arts, every aspect of American life has been enlivened and elevated, enhanced and energized, by new arrivals bearing unfamiliar customs hailing from distant lands. And many times, those lands were far from shimmering and flawless utopias. Indeed, those lands were places our president might consider to be shitholes.

So, why take in people from ‘shithole’ countries?

Because imagine what kind of culturally deprived shithole America would be without them.