I may not agree with Donald Trump on anything, but I do have to give him one thing: the man can start a controversy like no other. In a bipartisan meeting aiming to reach a compromise regarding DACA and other immigration policies, Trump allegedly said, regarding Haiti and most African nations, "Why are we letting people in from shithole countries?". This remark is interesting to me because this wasn't in reference to illegal immigration, but legal immigration.

Even the most staunch Republicans have always defended legal immigration into America, but even this is somewhat hypocritical.

Americans, Republicans especially, are always flaunting this idea of American exceptionalism; that America is the greatest country on earth, and the freest and full of opportunity. Logically, people from other countries hear about how great this place is, and want to come live here, especially if they really do live in "shitholes." When they arrive, they are met with a system that seemingly does everything it possibly can to make it impossible to gain citizenship, as it can take years for applications to even be taken into consideration.

In that time, you are not allowed to work, and undocumented immigrants are forced to break the law just so that they can support their family, all in the hope that one day, the American government will give them the chance for a better life that they gave up everything for. I would argue that this difficulty is by design.

For as long as there have been immigrants, there have been people trying to keep them out.

The United States has a very long history of anti-immigrant sentiment. It started with the Irish in the early 1800s escaping the potato famine. American citizens hated the Irish, so much so that they would post signs in business windows that said: "Irish Need Not Apply." The Irish were seen as lazy, a threat to the job market, and unable to integrate into American society. However, as we all know, the Irish have now integrated so well that a time in which they were hated seems preposterous.

This wasn't the last time America got freaked out immigration; the Chinese, the Poles, the Italians, the Japanese, and now the Mexicans and Muslims. The races and ethnicities may change, but the anti-immigrant rhetoric has been a constant. In the late nineteenth century, a large influx of Chinese immigrants led to the Chinese Exclusion Act, the largest restriction of immigration in American history. Immigration quotas were put into effect in many countries, and we all remember the Japanese internment camps.

There is always one similarity in these stories, and it's the belief that these immigrants are an "other." They're something different than us, and certainly not American, but that's just wrong. Every European American in this country was an immigrant; we don't just call ourselves a nation of immigrants for funsies. We are one. Just as white Europeans are Americans, anybody regardless of race or ethnicity can also be American.

We call ourselves a melting pot because we are one; we're a nation of many peoples coming together around a set of values that we believe in, and immigrant or native-born, legal or undocumented, everyone who has come to America believes in those core values: the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, and that all are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.