The lingering question with the thousands of children detained along the US-Mexico border is are we still a nation that takes action or have we become paralyzed by our politics? What’s at stake is the United States’ claim to greatness. We view ourselves as the one indispensable nation, a beacon of hope and liberty to the rest of the world. We didn’t get that reputation just because of what our founding fathers wrote down in the late 1700s; it’s something we’ve earned generation after generation.

When other nations have turned away from crisis or been unable to lend a hand, the United States has stepped up to the challenge. You don’t climb to greatness and stay there by talking a good game. You have to keeping earning by actually doing great things. In this case, if we can’t figure out how to do right by 52,000 kids fleeing horrific conditions in Central America, then our claim to greatness is suspect at best. I still refuse to believe we won’t rise to the occasion. It seems un-American that our response to a humanitarian crisis on our doorstep would be to bar the door.

Right now we are failing a moral test. These children have fled brutality in their homelands (primarily Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador) and traveled through areas controlled by drug cartels in Mexico in order to reach the United States. Our response has been to throw them into detainment camps little better than prisons. Families know beforehand that their children may be raped, enslaved, or murdered along the journey — and they still send them. Parents are giving their daughters birth control shots in case they’re raped or turned into sex slaves by the cartels. That’s how bad conditions are in those Central Americans countries. The horrors of the journey pale in comparison to the horror of staying at home, where the murder rate is skyrocketing.

Imagine spending your last dollar to send your children away on a hellish trek they may not survive. It should shock our sensibilities that life has become so desperate for so many in countries so close to home. These families are sending their children in the hope that they will arrive in a country of fundamentally good people who will give these kids a chance at having a safe and dignified life. It begs the question, are we those fundamentally good people our neighbors to the south hope we are?

Let’s be clear about something here. Almost all of us, nearly each and every American citizen, is in this country because either we or our ancestors immigrated here. In many cases it involved people fleeing oppression, famine, and genocide. Most of our ancestors did not get here via a luxury liner. They were of modest or few means when they arrived. Our nation has prided itself on raising up the downcast and destitute, on becoming a nation where the dream of a better life becomes a reality. That is the value inscribed at the foot of the Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

That is the value we advertise to the rest of the world. For the entire history of the United States of America, the downtrodden but hopeful people of other nations have come here seeking a better life. It will continue as long as there is a United States of America. This is never going to stop. It’s something we need to manage sensibly from here to forever. Rather than demonizing the children who are coming to our border and stirring up pointless political panic over the situation, we should be guided by our own humanity. These are kids. If tens of thousands of Mongolian kids seeking to escape rampant violence in their home country were being detained along the Russian border, I suspect we’d take a dim view of the Russian response.

Gov. Deval Patrick deserves credit for having Massachusetts take on part of the responsibility of moving these children out of overwhelmed border camps. If every state followed suit, we’d have a far more stable and humane situation on our hands. Also, Massachusetts is a well-to-do state that generally espouses a fairly liberal set of values. If we’re not going to step up to help a population of children in need, then who is? Hope has to start somewhere.

The naysayers keep coming up with excuses for why we should return these children to the hells they escaped. They say it will cost money. Yes, but given the trillions of dollars we’ve blown on military follies in the Middle East, a relatively small amount devoted to the safety and well-being of some children would be money well spent. They say one of these kids might go on to do something bad. Yet 51,999 might go on to do something good. They say we shouldn’t encourage more families to send their children on the perilous journey north. Yet that ignores the desperate conditions fueling this humanitarian crisis. Families do not send their children away on a whim. This has become a life or death choice.

There is no single solution to the problem, but we can start by caring for the children displaced by the violence raging to our south. The United States needs to involve other nations in this hemisphere in helping to provide asylum. We need to engage at a much deeper foreign policy level on our own continent and find humanitarian agencies that can help inside of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. We need to develop a strategy that diminishes the influence and power of Central American drug cartels, something smarter and more effective than the failed War on Drugs.

Most of all, we must stop whipping ourselves into a frenzy over immigration issues. These are people, in this case children. We all know our immigration system is broken and needs fixing, that it does not match up to how people come to and stay in this country. The near-constant vitriol spewed against Hispanic immigrants is making us unable to respond to this humanitarian crisis spilling over our border. We’re incarcerating children because we refuse to come together to do the decent and right thing.

The crisis here in the United States isn’t that children are coming to our border. The crisis is that we are failing to respond to it with basic humanity. We need to live up to the words on the Statue of Liberty. We are failing at our own values. This is a test of the American character. This may not be a problem of our creation, but when has that ever stopped us from becoming part of the solution? I believe in the greatness of the United States. Let’s earn it again.

Joseph Curtatone is the mayor of Somerville.