His presumption seems to be that other nations are deliberately sending to the United States their least-desirable citizens. That sounds a lot like the Mariel boatlift of 1980, in which Cuba released a number of inmates from jails and mental facilities, dispatching them to the United States as part of a massive refugee exodus. It seems to shape the way Trump views all immigration—he and aides have cited it repeatedly.

But in the vast majority of cases, this is not how immigration works. Governments are not deciding who to send. People are deciding to leave, often at great risk, out of personal motivation. Those who come are the ones “who had a special love for freedom and a special courage that enabled them to leave their own land, leave their friends and their countrymen, and come to this new and strange land to build a New World of peace and freedom and hope,” as Ronald Reagan once put it.

This entirely different paradigm is one reason Trump, unlike most of his fellow Republicans, wants to limit not only illegal immigration but legal immigration as well; he seems to object not just to illegality, but to much immigration itself.

This zero-sum mentality is why he approaches refugees as safety threats and drains on U.S. government resources, seldom considering the reasons refugees have been driven to leave. There’s a middle ground—there are people who believe that on the one hand, refugees deserve aid but that on the other hand the United States must work within its means, and safety threats must be eliminated—but Trump’s comments, both previously and about Haitians and Salvadorans now, demonstrate this is not his view.

Trump’s decision to label these places “shitholes” is coarse and revolting, but the greater failure is his inability to connect his assessment with what it means for the people who live there. He either cannot see or is not interested in the conflicts and violence and poverty that immigrants are seeking to leave behind, and he is not interested in the extent to which the U.S. has contributed to these problems through interventions in El Salvador and Haiti. Thus his cavalier attitude about Haitians (though he was more than happy to acknowledge Haiti’s problems when that was an effective political weapon against Hillary Clinton) or Salvadorans, 200,000 of whom the government announced this week would have to leave, having been allowed to stay following earthquakes in 2001. The historic U.S. role as a hemispheric hegemon and as a symbol of humanitarianism simply does not interest Trump—aides last summer held a 90-minute crash course on this topic—because he cannot fit it into his calculus.

The congressional leaders who Trump stunned with his comments on Thursday have real differences over how to handle immigration. But for the most part, they see immigration as a complex issue, requiring them to balance competing interests. The president, however, cannot seem to see any way that black and brown people from impoverished, disaster-stricken, or violence-torn countries fit into his zero-sum scheme or his overwhelmingly white vision of what America should look like.