At a recent security conference in Munich, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told assembled leaders that America would help with what he called European “revitalization” if the continent put an end to “civilizational erosion,” which he tied to “managed migration.” Europe, he all but said, should follow the lead of U.S. policy, rooted in detention and deportation. Migrants, like Jews of another era, are now perceived as money-hungry interlopers. In every sense, migrant has been made into this century’s dirtiest word, one mostly assigned to Muslims, Hispanics, and, more generally, those of darker skin, who occupy a space outside compassion’s embrace. No one should feel the slightest guilt in treating them as vermin, never mind that their flight to Europe is largely a trek born of hope. America First cares not at all and instead builds camps while Italy lets rickety boats founder in the Mediterranean. These ongoing events put me in mind of David Lynch’s remarkable 1980 film, “The Elephant Man,” in which a monstrously deformed British youth — he has spent most of his life as a circus freak — finds himself so tormented by gawkers that at a certain point he cries aloud, “I am a human being!” His name was Joseph Merrick, and he suffered through an entirely alienated existence in Victorian England, rescued only by a London surgeon able and willing to see beyond his first-person civilizational decline. Today’s migrants have few such benefactors. On the contrary, ciphers in the stream, they face a rising tide of wrath from people, police, and politicians who, unable to release their rage into a cathartic world war, turn to imagined elephant men.