Many Americans would just love to throw the book at Donald Trump, perhaps the most polarizing person in American history. Any book would do. Preferably, a heavy one — but what most have in mind is a law book that comes with prison time and a lifetime ban from public life.

Let’s get something straight at the outset: I am a child of immigrants and a first-generation American. I need no convincing that America was built by people from other lands. The Pilgrims, Puritans, Calvinists and Quakers did a nice job during those early American Thanksgivings, but without the industry, initiative and intelligence of immigrants who started arriving in ever increasing numbers from the 1880s until after World War II, the United States would simply be another Canada—with far fewer decorous people.