If you are reading this online we are today celebrating Thanksgiving, a holiday that despite its harvest celebration trappings, is intimately tied to a specifically American anecdote turned to history.

Which one of us hasn’t heard the story of how a small colony of strangers, wayfarers seeking a safe haven on new shores, were starving until those folks whose land they had settled on — the Wampanoag at Plymouth Colony — came to their rescue?

The Wampanoag brought the food stuff for the feast-become-holiday (which may have included turkey but likely also duck and/or goose, venison, shellfish, corn mush, berries and native squashes, according to the History channel). More importantly, they are also credited with sharing life-sustaining skills, tools and lore about their homeland with the newcomers, so that their fellow human beings might survive beyond the feast.

Today, for many of us, the holiday has less to do with history and more to do with family; it is the weekend for which we’ll travel over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house, to sit down to a board that — because the majority of us are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants — may also include lasagna, stuffed grape leaves, daal, pernil, or Jamaican-style curry goat.

Or, perhaps it isn’t family but friends — often enough our family of choice — we gather to ourselves at this time of year.

In either case, at its foundation, the choice to celebrate Thanksgiving is born of several human needs — to express gratitude for what has been received and to acknowledge ourselves part of a greater whole.

Much has been written already about the parallels between current day immigrants or refugees and those who, centuries ago, almost certainly would have perished without Wampanoag assistance. Much of what has been written tries to appeal not only to the shared intellectual understanding of a world built wholly from journeys of migration (we all migrated from the African birthplace of human ancestry, after all, and haven’t ceased moving from country to country, continent to continent, since), but also to the tenets of many spiritual belief systems.

From local folkways to the great monotheistic religions, we are enjoined us to entertain and offer welcome to the stranger. More, in Judeo-Christian tradition, are told not only to welcome, but to treat the stranger the way we would treat angels, or God.

Many of the U.S. legislators who recently voted to bar Syrian refugees from entry (as well as those who have have echoed Donald Trump’s barbaric salvos about Muslims, Mexicans and immigrant “others” in general) are not only the descendants of immigrants but also call themselves people of faith. And still in the current climate of fear, outrageous xenophobic rhetoric and blatant politicking, nobody’s treating the immigrant or refugee as the desperate wayfarers they are, but as de facto criminals.

Even though most of them are children.

Sixty-seven percent of the Syrian refugees referred to the U.S. from the United Nations are women and children under the age of 12. That means it is infants and toddlers and children up to seventh grade we are sealing ourselves off from. In xenophobic fear. In panic. In the name of safety.

Unfortunately, this is not unprecedented. When the “unaccompanied minors crisis” exploded in 2014, those who were apprehended at the southern border (after fleeing Central American nations with the highest murder rates in the world) were mostly teenagers — but  roughly a quarter of them were children under 12. We said no to them too.

A number of those unaccompanied minors who were returned home have died in the violence they were fleeing. The number of Syrian refugees who will die if refused asylum will undoubtedly be much greater.

So as we sit at our Thanksgiving tables this year we face the same choice the Wampanoag did  centuries ago. Do we walk away from those who look and sound and worship differently than us, and so leave them to fend for themselves until they die?

Or do we make a space at the same table at which we were offered a seat, not so very long ago?