How low can the Washington DC-Virginia-Maryland paper go? Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell now claims that "America has always been hostile to immigrants":

At what point, in this great nation of immigrants, did calling someone an “immigrant” become such an insult?

Better question – at what point did any serious journalist or opinion writer decide that there as a latent or widespread hatred of immigrants, and that the term has become an insult? The true insult is using the term “immigrant” for those who brazenly break the law to enter the country.

Rampell continues:

Recent weeks — on the campaign trail and elsewhere — have been filled with ugly rhetoric about immigration status or other ethnic impurities, even when the target of such attacks has entered the country legally, is a naturalized American or is even an American by birth but descended from the wrong kind of parents. Witness Donald Trump’s proposal to deport first-generation Americans whose citizenship is conferred upon them, constitutionally, by birth. Witness legions of white nationalists lining up behind him, and the coded “dog-whistle politics” that other candidates are invoking to attract their own anti-immigrant coalitions.

So David Duke likes Donald Trump (or would if Trump weren't so supportive of Israel). That may be a bad sign, but the suggestion that Americans all over the country are itching to don white hoods and cleanse the country of immigrants and "ethnic impurities" is a reprehensible insult.

Even presidential contenders who are themselves the children of immigrants and lucky legatees of the great American melting pot are denouncing the uncontrollable invasion of foreigners.

Rampell isn't specific about who those contenders are, but she might want to discuss how the Republican Party Presidential candidates sport one of the most diverse and impressive benches in recent memory, compared to the Old White Men (and Woman) dominating the Democratic Party's bench.

It’s tempting to blame Trump for igniting the fires of xenophobia, betraying the great tradition of embracing immigrant strivers. But the embarrassing truth is that the United States has always been hostile to immigrants. Or at least, a strong and vocal faction has been. This nativist streak dates back even to the earliest days of the republic.

So now Rampell admits that the United States has not always been hostile to immigrants - only "a strong and vocal faction" has been.

You know Ellis Island, the place textbooks portray as the welcoming ward for generations of dreamers?

“We think of Ellis Island as this great monument to immigration. It’s really the monument to border control,” says Morris Vogel, president of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which painstakingly reconstructs the squalor and ambition of 19th- and 20th-century immigrants. Ellis Island was, Vogel notes, “the first wall,” often used to repel undesirables.

“Undesirables” include individuals with severe, communicable disease, as well as domestic terrorists and anarchists. We tend to forget that one President (McKinley) was assassinated by a deranged immigrant anarchist, and his successor (Teddy Roosevelt) was nearly killed in a similar manner. Every nation takes necessary and proper steps to ensure secure borders and safe citizens. That is neither hateful nor spiteful.

What about the European immigrants welcomed in decades prior, when they fled poverty, persecution or potato famine?

Well, in the mid-19th century, an entire national political party — the Know Nothings — was predicated on fears that morally and racially inferior German and Irish Catholic immigrants were threatening the livelihoods and liberties of native-born Protestants.

The Know-Nothings had marginal influence, and became a laughing stock which dissipated into nothing.

Even earlier, some of our most venerated Founding Fathers — people who had abundant evidence of the additive properties of ethnic diversity and benefits of infusing the economy with fresh blood — exhibited frighteningly nativist tendencies. Benjamin Franklin denounced the scourge of “swarthy” German immigrants who refused to speak English, for example.

Seriously? Ben Franklin's complaint about immigrants who didn't speak the language is "frighteningly nativist"?

Even the West Indian-born Alexander Hamilton — arguably the immigrant who made the biggest contribution to U.S. political history — later in his career denounced lax immigration policies. In the terrific bio-musical of his life now lighting up Broadway, the word “immigrant” is often hurled at him as a winking epithet. But in real life, perhaps for reasons of political expedience, he warned of letting in and then naturalizing too many foreigners, whose inferior breeding and insufficient commitment to American values might threaten the fragile republic. “In the infancy of the country, with a boundless waste to people, it was politic to give a facility to naturalization; but our situation is now changed,” he wrote in 1802.

So Rampell references a current musical but no statistical data or researched evidence to support her unserious and offensive argument of widespread and long-standing hatred of immigrants among Americans.

In fact, based on current data, Americans are angry not so much with immigrants themselves but with the flagrant flouting of the rule of law by the current President and with a government that does not enforce the law and refuses to secure the border despite a rising number of crimes committed by illegal aliens.

Americans as a whole are neither racist, xenophobic, nor anti-immigrant, but they are angry with the lack of immigration enforcement in this country, and with their leaders for not taking the necessary steps to protect their rights.