When I saw Donald Trump take an interest in the horrible killing of a Georgia nursing student, I was swept by a profound sense of having been here before.

In 2015, Trump made a national cause out of the fatal shooting of Kate Steinle in San Francisco, allegedly by Jose Ines Garcia-Zarate, a migrant in the U.S. illegally. Garcia-Zarate was later acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges after a 2017 trial in which his defenders argued the death was an accident.

Flash forward nine years and the victim Trump now is fixating on is Laken Hope Riley, 22, a nursing student whose body was found Feb. 22 in the woods near a jogging trail on the University of Georgia campus. And again, the suspect is an immigrant — 26-year-old Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan citizen now charged with the killing.

Former-and-possibly-future President Trump is back, calling Ibarra a “monster” on social media and promising to immediately “seal the border” if elected president.

Trump, who famously launched his first presidential bid with promises to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, now is using the issue to galvanize other Republicans in a united front against the illegal border crossings that have occurred since President Biden took office in 2021.

The Biden White House also extended condolences to Riley’s family, declaring in a statement that “people should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law if they are found to be guilty.”

But simple condolences are hardly enough for Trump and other Republicans at a time when a recent Monmouth University poll found more than half of Americans polled support building a wall for the first time since Monmouth started asking the question in 2015.

Still, as effective as fear of crime or competition for jobs can be as a motivator for voters to rally behind an ambitious politician’s anger at immigrants, the anti-immigration message also can also steer voters onto a self-defeating path.

For example, as outraged or fearful as we might justifiably be about violent crimes, experts say most evidence suggests immigrants who are in the country illegally don’t cause much of it.

The number of homicides fell last year in nearly two dozen U.S. cities, including Chicago, despite tens of thousands of migrants bused here by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to protest Biden’s border policy.

Sure, many communities continue to face higher levels of deadly violence than before killings spiked in 2019, according to a new report on crime trends by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice. And numerous cities are seeing other serious crimes, such as motor vehicle thefts, increasing still even as homicides fall, according to the report.

The Congressional Budget Office, though, offers some positive news touching on immigration. This month, the nonpartisan agency estimated that the U.S. labor force will expand by 5.2 million people by 2033 — thanks in particular to net immigration.

In one bold conclusion, the agency projects that the nation’s economy will mushroom by $7 trillion more over the next 10 years than it would have without the new arrivals.

But the contentiousness of the issue is not going away. Immigration remains an intensely polarizing matter in our politics. New data from Gallup finds that Americans consider immigration to be the country’s top concern, surpassing inflation, the economy and issues with government.

Having immigration at the top of Americans’ list of worries is nothing new. We’ve been here before. But, despite the angst brought on over decades and even centuries when foreigners have sought a new life in America, the contributions of immigrants to the American story are undeniable.

We shouldn’t forget that, even as cities like Chicago struggle to manage and assimilate waves of newcomers. As much as immigration has led to suspicions, conflicts and misunderstandings, on balance it’s contributed to our country’s productivity and culture, and it’s made life better for families escaping harsh conditions in their homelands.

So it can be again.

E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.

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