Seeing the masses of people sitting under bridges or walking en masse on the Southern border fills me with great sadness. These folks — men, women and children, families — come from great distances, from places not many Americans could ever live or survive living in. I empathize with them. Most will never make it into the United States, and many who do will definitely be deported back to their countries of origin.

Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, has been waging a war against “sanctuary” cities’ mayors by dropping off busloads of South American immigrants. In it all and like in other cities across America, Mayor Michael Johnston and the city of Denver have done a yeoman’s job. To this point, 42,000 immigrants have traveled to Denver, costing the city $72 million to shelter, feed and transport them to their final destinations in the U.S. It has forced the city to cut services and freeze hiring to come up with funds to pay for their care.

For their part, many migrants are living an undignified existence, considering that many were professionals who lived reasonable lives in their countries of origin. They have traveled thousands of miles to escape poverty or regimes inimical to them. They find that the United States of freedom of their imagination doesn’t exist. What they encounter is a less welcoming United States, a country of harsher opinion of foreigners and migrants.

Our state’s ability to support undocumented immigrants has been exhausted; cities don’t have the wherewithal to support more undocumented immigrants. It’s particularly true today, a time when our homeless crisis continues to rise, from a bearable headache to a debilitating migraine.

All the foregoing said, and especially in view of some politicians saying they’ll round up undocumented immigrants and deport them en masse, the fact about Americans is we can’t function as a society without immigrants’ labor. There are no Black or Hispanic jobs. Every American, from city slickers to rural farmers, wants and needs immigrant labor. Even Donald Trump used immigrants to build his hotels and in day-to-day hotel upkeep. We can’t forget two of his spouses were foreign born.

My view about migrants is, we each see them in a different light. My immigrants are really good people. When I ask them to do work I cannot do, or don’t have time to do, they do a good job at a reasonable cost. And then of course I have friends and neighbors and co-workers who are immigrants. They are good men and good women. My friends have immigrant friends and workers, all equally as good. And yet, some people look at my immigrants and see what some politicians kvetch about, when they call them rapists, thieves, drug addicts and murderers. The fact is, they are none of those things.

Those of us who feel immigrants are burdensome will always see most of them as conforming to the descriptors Trump has foisted on immigrants. Sadly, there resides in the American psyche an enduring suspicion of foreigners and immigrants. It’s bizarre, since most Americans are from elsewhere. Despite the evidence about the benefit and power of America’s immigrant population, we are afraid that those who come after us will diminish our wealth and opportunities.

The U.S. immigration crisis is useful as a political football; a game in which the tired, poor, homeless, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, are no longer our concern. Unregulated and in disorder, the border only serves as a loud, irrational exhortative anvil for certain unscrupulous politicians.

Because of our history, our work must start where for more than a century we’ve played an active role — Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and any number of places come to mind. Whether we like it, countries in Central America, where we had a heavy influence, will forever look up at us and expect our help.

If we tolerate regimes we don’t now consider ideal or fully democratic — e.g., China and Modi’s India — we can tolerate those closer to us, whose actions result in surges of human migration north. It is there that changing the immigration reform dialogue must start. That, in addition to our borders. Without alleviating conditions in places where these people come from, they’ll continue marching northwards.

Pius Kamau, M.D., a retired general surgeon, is president of the Aurora-based Africa America Higher Education Partnerships; co-founder of the Africa Enterprise Group and an activist for minority students’ STEM education. He is a National Public Radio commentator, a Huffington Post blogger, a past columnist for Denver dailies and is featured on the podcast, “Never Again.”