In Vox, liberaltarian Will Wilkinson explains:

Democrats debate policy as Trump pursues a radical ethnonationalist agenda. By Will Wilkinson Feb 22, 2018, 12:30pm EST

… The Americanness of Hispanic Americans ought to be indisputable. Spanish colonial culture precedes English colonial culture in North America. Coronado made it all the way to where Kansas sits today, not far from my birthplace in Independence, Missouri, in 1541. Spaniards established settlements in Florida in the 1560s. A Spanish mission was established in what is now the state of New Mexico in 1598 for the purpose of converting the indigenous peoples to Catholicism.

The English Jamestown Colony was established in 1607. The Pilgrims did not arrive at Plymouth Rock until 1620. …

Trump supporters who thrill to the idea of a “big, beautiful wall” on the border largely fail to grasp that the ancestors of many of the people they want to keep out have been here all along, and that people cross back and forth over the border in part because the border crossed a people. …

And a threat to any subset of Americans is a threat to America — to us. Trump’s unilateral act of political hostage-taking was, from the beginning, an act of violent division, an assault on the integrity of the actual, existing, real-world American people.

The ethnically purified fantasy of the populist imagination is a seditious force that obscures our higher loyalties, shatters the peace of liberal equality, and splits Americans into warring tribes ready to abuse people whom patriotic decency would otherwise compel us to defend.

Will Wilkinson is the vice president for policy at the Niskanen Center, and a Vox columnist.