Imagine for a moment that you are the new President of the United States. Your country is young but powerful. Its rise was fuelled by immigrants, epitomised in the Statue of Liberty poem, ‘The New Colossus’:‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.’

Perhaps your antecedents arrived from Germany and Scotland. Why then, would you make it your mission to prevent and deter such immigration today? Well, not everyone likes to share, of course. Might life be more comfortable for those of you who have made it, if you pull up the ladder behind you? Or perhaps there are less selfish arguments you could present that are not predicated on perceived racial, language and cultural differences?

While your country can hardly be considered overcrowded it’s possible that there is a feeling of entitlement, specifically the sense that each citizen owns a share, in the business sense, of this great corporation.It is something that I feel about the UK, that it is in some small portion ‘mine’. After all, I vote at shareholders’ meetings.

While it may be a fiction, it is something inculcated into each of us. The Flag, the Constitution, the bulldog spirit. Does immigration dilute your shareholding, make it worth that little bit less?

Then there is the feeling of fairness. I have to sign a form and have it accepted in order to enter the United States, with time limitations on my right to remain. Those who don’t arrive this way have a far tougher time, of course, but the rules-based order has a name, and it is civilization.

The concept of ‘us’ is natural, but that inevitably means also the flip side, the idea of ‘the other’. Are these ‘others’ not just stealing my land, but also more constitutional aspects of my birthright?

We see this instinct everywhere - hese hatreds are a terrible burden on society, but also on the individual, the hater. It can be resisted, through contact, through experience, through education. I ‘woke’ from this affliction as an adult.

We know, of course, the horrors that attend apartheid and racial scapegoating, but times have been economically tight and our welcome mat is old and threadbare. Those whose entry to the American dream is outside the rules also tend to be the go-getters, those who take risks and get things done.

Are they not what we seek, an added dynamism to a stale West, the same pioneers as they who killed off the buffalo and those who depended on them? They will be more or less moral; criminals will inevitably be part of it, but a minority, as with those already US citizens. And a few will seek to change the laws and customs of those whose hospitality they take for granted. But isn’t this entirely normal? We arrive in this World with an instinct for fairness, but also for community, which we defend. Now that you are President, which way will you go?