To the editor:

Donald Trump’s paternal grandfather was an immigrant. Two of his three wives — also immigrants. His youngest son is the child of an immigrant. JD Vance’s wife is the daughter of immigrants. Yet Trump has claimed that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

That same libel was screamed in the past about Jewish immigrants, Irish ones and the Chinese, too. Vance, a Catholic convert, should know that his claim about legal Haitian immigrants — that they can’t be assimilated into American life — is just a repetition of the same 19th and early 20th century charge against Polish and Italian Catholic immigrants along with the Irish.

These blatant, irrational, often-violent prejudices have been repeated and then proven false so often in our history that we should have no trouble seeing them for what they are. The sad mystery is why anyone today would believe that vitriolic hogwash.

Haskell Springer,

Lawrence