What hasn’t changed is that immigrants, on the whole, succeed. “Foreign farmers in our county were the first to become prosperous,” Cather’s (grown-up) narrator notes. “After the fathers were out of debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors — usually of like nationality — and the girls who once worked in… kitchens are to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own.” Yet many of the locals saw them as “ignorant people who couldn’t speak English.” That sounds familiar, too.

To read “My Ántonia” more than a century after its publication is a reminder of the timelessness of America’s bigotries, whose loudest and most dangerous champion sits in the White House.

But, more powerfully, Cather’s novel is a story of a country that can overcome prejudice. The narrator’s grandfather offers succor to the destitute Shimerdas, forgives them their debts, puts petty quarrels aside, and consoles them in their grief. After Ántonia’s father commits suicide, he prays “that if any man there had been remiss toward the stranger come to a far country, God would forgive him and soften his heart.”

It’s in such moments that “My Ántonia” becomes an education in what it means to be American: to have come from elsewhere, with very little; to be mindful, amid every trapping of prosperity, of how little we once had, and were; to protect and nurture those newly arrived, wherever from, as if they were our own immigrant ancestors — equally scared, equally humble, and equally determined.

That’s the “real America” that today’s immigrant-bashers, starting with the president, pretend to venerate and constantly traduce. You don’t have to favor sanctuary cities and the abolition of ICE to be on the right side of this debate. But you do have to recognize that the newest immigrants have as much claim to the country and its lawful freedoms as any other American. That would certainly include Minnesota’s Representative Ilhan Omar, whose rights must be defended every bit as vigorously as many of her views should be opposed.

That we have a president who doesn’t believe this, and a party bending constantly to his prejudices, is a stain on the United States. We can erase it by recalling what we’re really about, starting by re-reading “My Ántonia.”