Leon Panetta served as Secretary of Defense from 2011 to 2013, is chairman of The Panetta Institute for Public Policy. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

(CNN) The President of the United States recently made a vulgar and disparaging remark about immigrants to our country from poor and impoverished areas of the world. The remark is unsurprising -- it came from a President who seeks to close our country off from the rest of the world.

Leon Panetta

He has proposed imposing travel bans on visitors from some Muslim-majority nations, building harmful walls, deporting thousands of immigrants from Honduras and El Salvador, and even ending protections for hundreds of thousands of law-abiding recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programs -- known as Dreamers -- living within our borders.

It is important that the world knows that, although he may be President, Donald Trump does not speak for the overwhelming majority of Americans. This is not who we are.

I am the son of Italian immigrants who came to this country from an impoverished area of Italy. Like millions of other immigrants, they came because they believed they could give their children a better life in this country. That is the American dream. That is who we are.

That promise is enshrined on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" That is who we are.

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