Their skin is brown; mine’s white. They embrace socialism; I love capitalism. Their parents were born elsewhere; mine were born in Illinois. They live in big cities; I was reared on a farm.
I have little in common with the four members of Congress Donald Trump lashed out at this week.
But let’s be clear — it’s wrong to question these women’s patriotism as our president did.  He said, “If they want to leave, they can leave. They hate our country. They hate it, I think, with a passion.”
Trump was speaking of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts.
Trump also said they should “go back” to the countries they came from.
The last time I checked, all four of these women have sworn to uphold the Constitution. One of them loved this country enough to choose to become a citizen. The other three were born here in the United States. So, who knows where they are supposed to “go back” to.
I long for an America where we can debate who is right or wrong – not who is good or bad.
Sadly, these types of political attacks on immigrants and their children have become all too commonplace.
Back in 2016, then-U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk, of Illinois, posed a similar attack against the family of his opponent, Tammy Duckworth, who lost her legs in the Iraq War in 2004 when a rocket-propelled grenade hit the helicopter she was piloting.
During a debate Duckworth spoke about the human costs of war.

“My family has served this nation in uniform, going back to the Revolution. I’m a daughter of the American Revolution. I’ve bled for this nation,” she said. “But I still want to be there in the Senate when the drums of war sound,” she added. “Families like mine are the ones that bleed first. But let’s make sure the American people understand what we are engaging in, and let’s hold our allies accountable, because we can’t do it all.”
Kirk responded by saying, “I had forgotten that your parents came all the way from Thailand to serve George Washington.”
Duckworth’s mother is from Thailand and her father’s family has lived in this nation for many generations.
Both Kirk and Trump will deny their remarks were about race.
But take those denials with a whole shaker of salt.
Remember back to 2008 when the “birther” movement was born? Folks questioned whether the U.S.-born Barack Obama was eligible to be president because his father was from Kenya.
We rarely heard anyone suggest that Obama’s opponent John McCain wasn’t eligible even though he was born outside the 50 United States. His father, a U.S. naval officer, was stationed in what is now Panama along with his wife when McCain was born in 1936.
I believe that McCain was eligible, but his claim to being a “natural born” citizen would seem to be far more tenuous than someone, like Obama, who was actually born here.
The Constitution requires a candidate be a “natural born citizen” to be eligible to be president, a qualification most legal scholars agree includes individuals born abroad to an American parent or someone born in the U.S.
For years, Trump fanned the flames of the birther movement. He was the most prominent advocate for that ridiculous notion that Obama wasn’t eligible to be president.
Trump even once suggested that his one-time GOP rival Ted Cruz wasn’t a natural born citizen because he was born in Canada to a U.S.-born mother and Cuban-born father.
So, what do Cruz, Obama, Duckworth, Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Tlaib and Pressley have in common? They each had at least one parent born outside the 50 U.S. states.
But it goes beyond that. It is their “otherness” that is the dog whistle in these fights.
The parents in question weren’t of immediate European descent, leaving Trump and others of his ilk free to attack their children’s patriotism.
Don’t believe me?
Well, how often have you heard anyone attack Trump for having a mother born in Scotland?

Scott Reeder is a veteran statehouse journalist. He works as a freelance reporter in the Springfield area.