I’ve fallen into a pattern lately. Time and again, I find myself looking up from the reading I’ve been immersed in and calling over to my wife, “You’ll never believe what he said now.”

The phrases have jumped out at me, one after another. The vow to “drain that great swamp.” The prediction that “the race which has made our country great will pass away.” The promise to beat back the “invading hostile army” of “criminal immigrants” that are the “mentally or physically defective” dregs of their homelands and “not the stuff of which patriots are made.”

Maybe sentiments like these have also jumped out at you, in the news about immigration you’ve been consuming. The difference is that the writings on my reading list are more than a hundred years old.

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