Last year, I was in Switzerland interviewing refugees from war-torn Syria and Somalia and from Eritrea seeking new lives in Europe.

The Somalians and the Eritreans had gone, often on foot, from country to country. They had walked across deserts and spent days on inflatable boats to reach Europe. But they were bright-eyed with hope that a new life lay ahead.

The Syrians, largely family groups, were more somber than the young Africans, but they, too, were relieved to be on European soil away from the bombs and poison gas and the street fighting of a civil war.

Over the last several decades, I have frequently been a visitor in Islamic counties — Iran, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, Jordan, the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, and the West Bank of the Palestinian Territory. Of course, only two of these places, Iran and Syria, are on President Donald Trump’s list of countries from which refugees are not to be received. His apparent Islamaphobia, combined with the sweetness of the African refugees I met, have set me to remembering. In these trying times, I have been recalling the hospitality and generosity of Muslims I have met on my travels. What a contrast to what we now face in this country. Hospitality, of course, is a rule of the desert peoples, and generosity to those in need is a rule of the Koran.

It was early in my travels in the Middle East that I visited Isfahan, Iran. I had known of the beauty of its mosques, renowned as the most exquisite in the country, and long wanted to see them. But I arrived in Isfahan, as it turned out, on the most sacred holiday of the Muslim year. Iranians from all across the country were visiting Isfahan. There were no hotel rooms to be found and no flights to get me out of Isfahan before nightfall.

I walked from hotel to hotel seeking a room until a 12-year-old, sweeping the street outside a hotel, asked me why I was coming back so often. That visit to Iran was in the days of the Shah. The boy was the grandson of the hotel’s owner. He offered me his room for the night when I told him I could find no place to stay.

More recently, I was in Syria, crossing a multi-laned thoroughfare in the capital city of Damascus where the traffic roared by and there were pedestrian overpasses only here and there. I was standing, immobilized, on a traffic island. Then I felt a hand on my elbow. A woman took me by the arm and helped me dodge around the cars. As she left me, she smiled and said in English “Syrian people are kind people.”

Later on that visit, as I visited the site of the pillar where St. Simeon Stylites is said to have lived, a schoolboy, recognizing me as a tourist, greeted me.

“Welcome. What is your name? My name is Mohammed. How are you?”

Soon he was joined by two classmates, all named Mohammed. All were proud of their English. Each went in search of a welcome gift for me. One brought a cone of bright red ice; another a bouquet of poppies he had picked for me; another a key chain that said in Arabic and English “I love you.”

Later on that visit, which was soon after our invasion of Iraq, a Syrian-Armenian woman told me that Syria had taken in 2 million Iraqi refugees. “They are our next door neighbors. What else can we do?” she said.

In Ramallah, on the West Bank in the Palestinian State, I spoke with a Palestinian Christian whose family lives “across the border” in Jerusalem. In the same ways that, in the days of an East and West Germany, visits to the West were only allowed on special holidays, and only by the elderly Palestinians, she was only allowed into Jerusalem for Christmas and Easter, she said. “And there is no hope for peace unless Israel stops stealing our land for settlements,” she added.

When I left the West Bank I passed the graffiti-covered wall that separates the West Bank from Israel, erected after incidents of violence by Arabs against Jews. I was told that it had done some good. But in Bethlehem, which is on the West Bank, I had also been in an Arab refugee camp where, on the wall of his home, was the face of a 16-year-old boy who had been killed by Israeli soldiers for stone-throwing.

Far away from the Middle East, in El Paso, Tex. in 2008, I saw another construction that Donald Trump wants enlarged to keep Mexican refugees out of the United States. A 1,400-mile double metal fence from San Diego, Calif. to Brownsville, Tex., was going up. We were planning to spend between $3 and $5 million a mile for it, according to then El Paso Mayor, John F. Cook.

“Instead of spending millions of dollars on a fence, the country should be thinking about a holistic approach to the immigration problem,” the mayor said. “What we need is a decent guest worker program or permanent worker status. At least 90 per cent of the people coming across, legally or illegally, are economic immigrants who don’t want to be U.S., citizens. They just want to work. They’re willing to be hotel bellhops and housekeepers and meatpackers and chicken-pluckers, jobs the U.S. born population scorns,” he said. “Right here, in El Paso, we need more bridges to Mexico, not a wall between us. We have 20,000 pedestrians coming from Juarez just over the border to El Paso every day — some to buy, some to study, some to work. We should find a good way to keep the Mexicans coming, not waste our nation’s money trying to stop them.”

So much for anti-immigration policies in our nation that was made by immigrants.