Gail: Whew, so glad you mentioned that terrorist. Otherwise I would have agreed with everything you said and then where would we be conversation-wise?

It is true that the guy who killed eight innocent people with a truck in Manhattan was a product of the visa program, a program that was started to give more Irish and Italians a chance to legally immigrate.

But what drives me nuts is that the president constantly points to this one terrible crime as an argument that the visa program is bad, while every single day we have stories about innocent people blasted to smithereens by guns, and we never hear a peep. If we wanted to keep America safe, we would really, really crack down on gun purchases.

However, I am not demanding we do that to keep the government open.

Bret: Please don’t get me wrong. My objection is to the visa lottery, not what’s invidiously called “chain” migration. As you and many others have reminded us, this is how many of our ancestors arrived in this country and worked their tails off so that they could afford to pay steerage for their wives and children. Republicans used to be the “pro-family” party, but that was in days of yore, when George W. Bush was president.

I wrote a column last week pointing out that the same stereotypes and slanders applied today by people like Jeff Sessions against present-day immigrants were made over a century ago against my impoverished Jewish ancestors, who didn’t speak English, didn’t have Ph.D.s, and in a few cases held dangerous political views. Yet just imagine how much worse off America would be today if it had kept out the parents of a Jonas Salk, a Leonard Bernstein or a Mike Bloomberg. The same goes for every single other immigrant group, past or present.

Except Norwegians, of course!

Gail: Isn’t it interesting that Trump almost never talks about his immigrant ancestors? That’s usually reflexive for a politician. The other day when Paul Ryan was trying to get past the “shithole” incident, he instantly began talking about his ancestors from Ireland coming here and laboring on the railroads. Trump’s ancestors came from a terrible town in Germany — full of fertilizer fumes and impoverished grape-pickers — but he never mentions it.