Recently, I ended up in Home Depot looking over samples of ceramic tile. Poring over their own tile samples were a man, his son, and the son’s wife. Since I never leave home without him, I had my dog, Seamus, by my side. It turns out that the father is also a dog lover, so his interest sparked our conversation.

As the father petted Seamus, we chatted, quite naturally, about dogs. By and by, the subject under discussion circulated, inevitably, I suppose, to politics. The man suddenly made a disparaging remark about President Trump and his recent, and by the man’s passionate account, insensitive handling of the immigration issue. At the time, the infamous caravan loaded with Latinos was rumbling inexorably northward toward the southern U.S. border. The President, as a preemptive strike, had already dispatched the military to ward off what was, it was feared, nothing less than an invasion of American soil.

As is increasingly the case these days with those of the liberal persuasion, this man’s passion reflected the party line: anything President Donald Trump says or does should be condemned. After a minute or two railing that the immigrants should be allowed unfettered access to the United States, the man paused in his diatribe against the President. I seized this opportunity to ask simply, “Where are we going to put them?”

With pained expression, gesturing to the infinite, sweeping both hands out toward the limits of the Universe, he said emphatically, “I have driven across North Dakota and Montana. There’s lots of land out there. There’s lots of land out there.”

I said calmly, “Oh, you mean the Frontier?”

“There’s lots of land up there,” he said a second time, again sweeping the sky overhead for effect, “there’s lots of land out there.”

“You mean the Frontier,” I said again, “the Prairie, all of that free land out there”?

Finally, he had heard me. He remained silent and I believe he was listening. I continued, “All of the land in America is owned. It is Indian Reservation, National Park, land owned by the Federal government, by private citizens, municipalities, corporations, cities. It is ranch land and farms. This is not 1870. There is no more frontier, no more prairie, no more free land.

“So, you are going to tell Rancher Jones, who owns a thousand acres in Montana, that you have 100,000 people from Afghanistan (meanwhile, Rancher Jones is struggling with exactly what and where Afghanistan is) and that you are going to put them on his land. You think Rancher Jones is going to cotton to that?

“Furthermore, what was once the mighty industrial and manufacturing machine that made America a force to be reckoned with is gone. Our factories, mills, and industry have been given away to other countries. We don’t make anything here anymore. Our skilled labor is ancient history, manufacturing a now-tearful relic of the American past.

“What are these immigrants you are championing going to do here to make money to buy food to feed the wide open mouths of their young? We cannot even provide jobs for our own people. How can we provide jobs for this veritable Tsunami of newcomers?”

After a brief pause, the father finally spoke. “Well,” he said quickly, with a dismissive wave, “those people won’t to live way up there anyway.”

I said, still calmly, “Okay, so they will all go to the cities. So, we will just keep making the cities bigger and bigger, and bigger”?

The father remained strangely silent, but his expression betrayed the dawning of a new consciousness.

I possibly could be accused at this juncture of being somewhat naïve, but I honestly believe that I finally got through to this man. He has spent so many empty years championing the liberal party line, chanting the liberal mantra of open borders, a true believer in the myth of America as the land of opportunity, a devotee of the wildly-fantastical myth “everyone should have a chance to come here” (I actually have heard people say this), that he can no longer see the trees for the forest, or even the forest for the trees.

America as the land of opportunity, accepting floods of immigrants may have worked for the first two-hundred years of our history, but it has become a policy archaic and unrealistic. a tradition dangerous and expensive to maintain on many levels.

I watched a few minutes of President Trump’s recent, somewhat-uncharacteristically-animated speech delivered to a crowd in El Paso wherein he described the new southern border wall and the various new security measures in place to protect us. Among these measures are a myriad of complicated hi-tech electronics that Mr. Trump admitted were beyond his comprehension.

Also among the security measures is the tried and true, and understandably, and by all accounts more-effective, German Shepherd guard dog. Mr. Trump seemed more excited by the idea of the dogs than by the electronics. Still, he said that the notion of his walking a German Shepherd across the White House grounds would not be right.

The President insisted that we need to develop a sensible immigration plan. I did not listen to the whole speech, so I cannot comment on its entirety. Still, I disagree with the President on two points. First, President Trump walking his German Shepherd around the White House grounds not only is perfectly natural, but sounds like a great idea to me, as long as he can find the time. A man must have a dog. It is the way of things.

Recall that history is replete with images and accounts of leaders with their trusty dogs by their sides. Conversely, there are no accounts of a leader commanding power and authority with his cat by his side.

Second, and more to the point of my commentary here, is that we do not need, as President Trump worded it, “a sensible immigration plan.” We need to end immigration to the United States of America. America is full. We should have ended immigration to the United States a full fifty years ago.