Borenstein: Mr. President, we’re not leaving. We’re already home.

The scene is burned into my childhood memories — and it shapes my response to the president’s bigoted comments this week about four members of Congress.

It was the early 1960s.

I was in elementary school in Oakland. A friend had let me try out his new bike one afternoon on the playground.

Some big kids came up to me, and one told me I better go home. They were rounding up the Jews, he said. I dropped the bike and started running. He laughed as I started to flee.

I’ll never forget that moment of fear. The sort of fear Donald Trump today seems to relish instilling in our nation’s immigrants.

Back then, the threat seemed plausible. As best we knew, my brother and I were the only Jewish kids in our neighborhood and at our all-white school. It was less than two decades after the end of the Holocaust and World War II.

We had been told about my grandfather who had died in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. About my uncle, who was sent as a young teenager to work in a German munitions facility and was executed when he and others tried to sabotage it. About my other uncle, who survived the war only because a Christian woman gave him her dead son’s birth certificate, enabling him to hide that he was a Jew.

My father had fled Poland for Palestine before the war and ended up fighting in the British Navy. He would tell us about how he survived when his ship went down in the German air attack on the harbor in Bari, Italy.

He eventually immigrated to the United States, where he married my mother, earned his architectural degree at UC Berkeley, and, six months after my birth in Berkeley, became a U.S. citizen.

We were well aware that my father was different. His accent. His inability to throw a football like the other kids’ dads. Our lack of a Christmas tree. And the different food we ate.

It was part of being first-generation American on my father’s side. My mom had had a similar experience: Her father and maternal grandparents were also immigrants to the United States.

Of course, Mr. President, I’m not going back. Not to Poland, from which the Borensztejn family originated. Nor to Russia, from whence the Aronofsky family began its migration.

Nor is Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota going back to Somalia, where she was born. Or Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan headed back to the West Bank or East Jerusalem, where her parents were raised.

As for the other two women of color attacked by the president: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, born in the Bronx, has parents who hail from Puerto Rico, which is, by the way, a territory of the United States. And Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.

We are all U.S. citizens. Including Trump, whose paternal grandparents immigrated from Germany and mother came from Scotland.

I knew even as a young child, and my father and his family knew all too well, how dangerous xenophobic nationalism can be.

We were then, and are today, a young nation primarily of immigrants. We have come from all corners of the world. We have a choice as a nation: We can embrace our racial and ethnic differences, or we can use them to foment division.

Trump is choosing the latter course. He’s certainly not the first person to shout “go back.” But he’s the first modern president to so transparently fan the flames of hatred.

Ten years ago, as we inaugurated the first African American president, it seemed this nation had begun to heal. But then Trump came along, and from his campaign to his presidency, he has re-normalized the bigotry we had hoped to leave behind.

He has warned of Mexican “rapists” coming across the border, disparaged immigrants from “s—hole countries,” called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States, questioned whether an Americanborn judge of Mexican heritage could be fair.

And he has now called out American citizens, members of Congress, with a racist trope.

He’s an international schoolyard bully. Members of his own party won’t even stand up to him.

The most powerful leader in the world is giving license to the next generation of intolerance, in the United States and around the world.

We must speak up. We can’t let this be the politics of the future.