On immigration, we’ve lost sight of the plot

about a teaching job at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, he and a pregnant Donna packed their three young children in a car and drove north and west.

Alas, when he got to still-territorial Alaska, the job fell through. So he returned to his vocation as a milkman.

Eventually, he scrimped and borrowed enough money to open a small grocery store of his own in Fairbanks. Then he opened another. Eventually he had seven supermarkets, Fairbanks’ first shopping mall and a wholesale food business that supplied native villages and the Russian far east alike. He also had nine children and invested his time, money and love into his community.

Opinions will differ about the takeaway of Paul’s story. For me, one of the most important things is not that he got rich. It’s that the United States gave him a shot to carve out the life that he wanted — and he remained grateful for the opportunity.

Today the conversation about immigration is so toxic in part because we poisonously disagree about what it means to be an American. Thanks to the identity politics of the left and the right, immigrants are increasingly cast either as imported victims ready-made to join the Coalition of the Oppressed or invading “takers,” “rapists” and even “animals.” If White House adviser Stephen Miller has his way, the children of immigrants would be seen as a terrorism threat, which might explain why the Trump administration is snatching babies from their mothers at the border.

Of course there’s a kernel of truth to both sides’ awful shouting points on immigrants, but they crowd out the greater truth: Most immigrants, even those who are in the country illegally, aren’t animalistic members of MS-13, nor are they eager to be props for the latest campus debate about intersectionality. Neither victims nor villains, they are human beings desperate to make the most of the American Dream as they see it.

That’s the immigration story in America: people leaving — or fleeing — the places of their birth for the freedom to try their best. No party owns that story. But each can abandon it.