Jules Witcover

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s war on immigration has focused mostly on Mexicans and other Latin-Americans illegally crossing our southern border, and on his commitment to build a huge wall to keep them out. So far it has been all talk and no action despite the advantage of a Republican-controlled Congress.

Since the end of the publicly condemned policy of separating families at the border this summer, illegal entries in family units have soared. Trump in turn has complained anew at massive campaign-style rallies designed to swell GOP turnout in next month’s congressional midterm elections.

He hopes to counter a Democratic blue wave at the polls with a red wave of Republican voters enflamed by the opposition’s failed effort to deny Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court. The president has declared that votes cast for Republican candidates will be votes for him, thereby reducing their roles in the midterms to mere vehicles for his self-aggrandizement.

Meanwhile, Trump’s dream of the wall is only one part of his fall anti-immigration offensive. His administration has also taken aim at legal immigration, reducing its annual quota next year from 45,000 admissions, already at a record low, to 30,000.

At the same time, a new policy is being weighed on family separation of refugees. It would detain illegal entrants and give parents the choice of keeping their children with them in detention or sending them to government shelters, pending the outcome of their application for entry.

This is a far cry from the historic saga represented by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, the gift of the people of France and memorialized there in Emma Lazarus’s words about “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

In the last two centuries, the American gates have swung open to welcome millions of Europeans and eventually Asians, all questing for political freedom and economic opportunity. Since the two world wars, they have also given haven to foreign freedom fighters from Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and elsewhere, as a modest payback for their contributions against communism and other authoritarian regimes.

In 1956, when the Soviet Union crushed a Hungarian Revolution, the United States settled for verbal support of the “captive nations” in Eastern and Central Europe. President Dwight Eisenhower limited our response to a refugee relief program that airlifted thousands of Hungarians to our shores and other Western countries willing to take them. Professional skills were often required for entry.

As a young reporter. I found two young Hungarians at the Austrian border, brought them to Vienna, helped them clear the U.S. process and be settled in Syracuse, N.Y., after which they eventually became naturalized citizens. But many other such refugees, for illness or others reasons, were stranded in refugee camps in Austria and in Italy years thereafter — and, believe it or not, many were held in former German concentration camps.

For years, many lived and raised families there, despite an eventual International Refugee Year that reduced but did not eradicate the humanitarian nightmare that prevails in some places to this day.

The American response to that war-related refugee crisis was widely criticized in some quarters as insufficient, or even regarding Hungary as a weak alibi for not backing up our tough Cold War rhetoric of military action.

But the realities of the nuclear era have put much such bravado on hold for many years. They are well illustrated now in President Trump’s huffing and puffing of “fire and fury” aimed at North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, prior to Trump’s more recent ludicrous profession of his love for him.

The denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula remains a pipedream in the era of Trump. Meanwhile, at home his own refugee problems in coping with millions of would-be American citizens from south of our border remains an ugly stain on our history as a beacon of hope to immigrants whose antecedents have enriched our nation.

One has to wonder how much of that national narrative is comprehended by the man now in the Oval Office. His concept of patriotism seems to include debunking our own heritage with ignorant and divisive rants against others among us, and among still others who want to share our dream.

Editor’s note: Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.