He said what a lot of people think and are afraid to say. Certainly after the murder this week of a young woman in San Francisco by an illegal-alien felon who’d been deported five times, what Mr. Trump said resonated.

My moderate Democrat friend who called this week was explicitly supportive of his comment, and asked my opinion. I said illegal immigration is a calamity. It is an admission by a nation that it has lost control not only of its borders but of itself. It is no longer functioning as a sovereign nation; it has lost its self-protectiveness and dignity. And in this predatory world they note when you don’t see to your own dignity. So I’ve long supported complete closing of the border to illegal entry and cracking down on visa overstays.

But as to Mr. Trump’s words, throughout our history other nations never sent their “best” to America. My people and my friend’s, the Irish, were not Ireland’s elite when they came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They had nothing back home, that’s why they left. The landed gentry, the high-born, the educated and established—they didn’t come here. They didn’t have to! The wretched refuse did. And the Irish transition to America was not so smooth. There was plenty of poverty, overcrowding, addiction, criminality. We should always remember—and Mr. Trump, as a native New Yorker,s should remember—that our city’s arrest vehicles weren’t known as paddy wagons for nothing.