The problem of displaced populations and their economic consequence is a worldwide phenomenon. Yet until 2016, my State Department permitted me and succeeding ambassadors to welcome hundreds of migrant families who had landed and traversed through Malta.

Today, however, the United States has joined other nations in pulling in its welcome mat. Irregular migrant families are actively being prosecuted, and worse, often being divided and separated from their children as part of the penalty for seeking a better world.

Our President repeatedly argues that the definition of a nation necessarily entails closed borders. Perhaps some in Malta agree. Yet, for America at least, this has not been our story line.

In the US, there were long periods in our national history when immigration was unrestricted. Obviously, then as now, there was and is a legitimate interest in screening out those who come to this land to do harm. Yet whether or not the migrant crisis is fake news, today’s migrant families are wrongly characterised as wholly burden.

In truth, today’s refugee is the equivalent in American history of the settlers to the Massachusetts Bay colony or the Virginias or Carolinas or Pennsylvania or Rhode Island. They all came to this place escaping oppression or limitation of one type or another. And their freedom of movement was valuable to them, but also quite valuable to us, bringing extraordinary economic progress for themselves and those who preceded them, as well as those who followed – that is, today’s American citizens.

It was by the personal initiative of refugees who first settled in the eastern-most territories and then over the next century and a half put down settlements that reached the Pacific from the Atlantic seaboard. 

Can one imagine our nation without the immoral and needless expense of building a presidential keep-out wall or maintaining a vast border force turning people away or jailing them? Of course, it is the story of America. A land well-endowed with natural resources and open spaces. A land that gave truth to the golden lamp held high by the Statue of Liberty;  we did not close our borders to these ‘industrious invaders’; nor did we cage them or do unspeakable violence to their families.

No, we put out a giant welcome sign and backed it up with the Homestead Act and other invitations to work hard and have that work rewarded with an ownership stake in this still unexplored land. The American continent is now fully explored, but it is hardly overfilled or fully utilised in the way that stewards of the land and natural resources that we did not create are expected to behave.

Malta and parts of Europe are in different circumstances to be sure. But today, many areas of the United States are starved for population. We are not a densely populated nation; unlike Europe our demographics are a few people per square mile rather than hundreds.

President Donald Trump is right that those who come with an agenda to do grave harm (à la 9/11) must be stopped, but that is not the story of the vast majority of immigrants and refugees who merely want the same chance to find and magnify their own opportunities in a manner similar to the early settlers and subsequent pioneers who carried prosperity across the Midwest, the Great Plains, and over the mountains to the west coast.

Yes, I can imagine my country without a police force whose essential message is to shout “Get out!”

What I cannot imagine is an America that would’ve been successful if it hid behind a wall or jailed and harassed new and hopeful populations.