When thinking about Latine Heritage Month, the story of immigration seems to be front and center these days because of the irresponsible and downright cruel immigration policies of the Trump Administration. It is unimaginably cruel when Trump deports people from Latin American countries to West African countries, cut off from the people they love and any kind of support.

And I get angry on how immigrants are depicted by the Trump Administration as rapists, crooks and people dependent on the public dole. These inhuman depictions appear to allow him to treat them as subhuman and deserving of no humane treatment at all.

In some ways, it takes me back to my own family history, back in the 1840s when they were immigrants from Germany. They were forced to hide their German language and learn English, especially during World War I. They were treated like the “other” by their Anglo-Saxon peers.

And so when I heard a cousin of mine, who is a good person, talking about immigrants living off of public assistance — another Trumpian lie — I had to remind her that our family lived off of public assistance, namely the cheap land that the government gave our ancestors as they became part of the critical number of white males required to live in Wisconsin before it could enter the United States as a state in 1848, a year after my ancestors arrived.

And I know my ancestors worked hard to make their dairy farms productive and self-supporting.

And so as I look at the stories of today’s immigrants, I see little difference except the largess that my ancestors received in the form of the land.