My two teenage kids were born and raised in Hawaii, far away from international borders, walls and mandatory highway checkpoints where people are questioned on their immigration status. Because of their isolation, the heightened rhetoric about our southern border, and my daily work in Hawaii with people whose lives have been profoundly impacted by being born on the other side of this human-created line, on our summer vacation this year we visited three U.S.-Mexico border cities in six days.

We crossed the border once, by foot into Nogales, Mexico, from Nogales, Ariz. The Mexican immigration agent barely glanced at us. We had our passports ready — but we were shocked at how easy it was for us to enter Mexico.

Later, in a little shop on the Mexican side, I asked the clerk if she had ever been to the U.S. side — just three blocks away. Once, she replied, many years ago as a little girl. Now it was too hard — impossible, really, she said, because applications for border crossing cards or tourist visas for someone like her, economically disadvantaged with no family in the U.S., are generally denied. Especially with your new president, she added.

The exchange served as an important lesson for my family about the incredible privilege we have due to the randomness of where we had all been born. I reflected on this as we later walked back into the U.S., through heavy U.S. security where documents were required and we were asked lots of questions.

As a child, July Fourth was a completely uncomplicated holiday: a family-and-friends day with flags and fireworks, watermelon and BBQs. As I grew older, those celebrations became more problematic as I learned that my country had not always been good to everyone the way it had been to my poor, uneducated European immigrant great-grandparents. They became more complicated as I learned that my African-American childhood friends could not trace their ancestry the way I could because the legacy of slavery robbed them of that; more complicated as I met people who were forced to flee their own homelands into mine, due to wars or economic policies that my country had orchestrated.

Most of us raised in the U.S. are taught that our nation was founded by people who were seeking freedom and the ability to make a better life for themselves and their families. The formation of the U.S. from the 13 colonies was portrayed as a noble narrative, so noble that it somehow excused (or glossed over or ignored) genocidal practices and land grabs crafted by very bright but sexist and racist white men whose lofty words of democracy, self-determination and freedom were intended for only a minority of our country’s inhabitants.

As we near this 241st birthday of my country, it troubles me deeply how much ground has been lost in the past few months. The travel ban targeting people from regions with a different religious belief system is back in place. Protections for undocumented people who were brought to the U.S. as children are under serious threat. Families who have sacrificed everything in pursuit of the same American dream sought by the founders of this nation, and my own great-grandparents, now go to sleep in fear of a knock on the door signaling arrest, detention, separation and banishment.

We seem to have forgotten that we are truly a nation of immigrants, and that even the first peoples who live within the borders of these United States migrated from somewhere else. The strength of the fabric of America is woven with threads from all continents and regions of the world.

As anti-immigrant rhetoric spewed by politicians has resonated through our nation, far too many have lost touch with their own immigration stories. Hand in hand with this forgetting of immigrant histories comes an inability to empathize with the migrants of today, to put ourselves in the shoes of those who are also seeking a similar better future for themselves and their children, just as the people who founded this nation.

Until this appreciation of our past is regained, we will be the “United” States of America in name only, and remain more divided than united.

Clare Hanusz is an attorney and founder of Aloha Immigration.