How very trendy it has become to flaunt our patriotism these days.

In a time when the phrase “freedom haters” has been transformed into an ambitious part of our national lexicon and “God Bless America” has become the knee-jerk response to most criticisms of our country’s current political state, recent attitudes toward illegal immigration make me wonder if many of us understand the history and dynamics of a country for which we’re so proud to stand.

This systematic defense recently appeared in a video on cnn.com featuring an Arizona man torching a Mexican flag as a response to the tens of thousands of protestors rallying against the potential for toughened immigration laws.

“God Bless America!” he shouted as he added more fluid to the flag’s burnt remains.

This kind of “patriotism” is undoubtedly meant to target the estimated 11,100,000 illegal immigrants in the U.S., 53 percent of which are Hispanic, according to the Pew Hispanic Center’s count for 2005. But before immigration protestors find another destructive way to point their partisan fingers, they should first revisit a little American History.

As our great-grandparents might remember, the U.S.’s attitudes toward immigration have been more congruent with economic interest than the principles of the constitution.

The Library of Congress’s Web site recalls: “In 1942, the U.S. and Mexico jointly created the bracero, or laborer, program, which encouraged Mexicans to come to the U.S. as contract workers. Braceros were generally paid very low wages, and often worked under conditions that most U.S. citizens were unwilling to accept. The program was very popular with U.S. farmers, and was extended well past the end of World War II, not ending until 1964. More than five million Mexicans came to the U.S. as braceros, and hundreds of thousands stayed.”

Anyone who has studied enough American history should know we also ended up deporting millions of Mexican workers back to Mexico during the Great Depression, when their presence became inconvenient. When our government has needed Mexican labor, it has gotten it, and when it doesn’t, it has been able to “return” it.

“A lot of people say immigrants are stealing our jobs, but that’s not the case,” said senior economics major and Labor Rights Alliance secretary Caleb Medearis. “Most of the immigrants are fulfilling an important need … There’s obviously a reason why we let them in.”

We’ve exploited cheap Mexican labor for years, so why now are we complaining about it? In my experience of growing up with friends and co-workers who were immigrants, Americans can be fearful of the mass influx of foreign culture for more than economic reasons.

There were more than a few times my friends and co-workers were the targets of vicious racial slurs, and several instances where their cultural customs were met with unfairly harsh responses. This kind of behavior has been echoed throughout the country as tensions over immigration laws continue to rise.

Medearis suggests that instead of “sorting out the immigrants and sending them back to Mexico,” which he describes as “logistically almost impossible,” we find a way to make illegal immigrants part of the system and “make them fully contribute.”

By embracing our neighbors instead of burning their flags, we would not only be helping to remedy this issue, but we would finally be honoring the principles inscribed on our Statue of Liberty. That would be much more of a step toward true patriotism than the ignorant and racist-tinged behavior of late. And that is what the phrase “God Bless America” should really be all about.