A friend said something to me once that I have never forgotten.

His name is Alec Baldwin. He told me, “I’m an old school American. That means I believe you’re an American the day you decide to come here and join us.”

I love that line. It is simple. It is generous. It is true.

That is the country I was raised to believe in. A country with room. A country that makes space at the table.

We seem to have forgotten that lately. We talk about walls. We talk about who to keep out. We talk about whole groups of people as if they were a problem to be solved.

But fear is a poor teacher. It tells us to lock the door. It tells us the stranger wants what is ours. It tells us there is not enough to go around.

Fear is almost always wrong.

A great American answered that same fear long ago. His name was Frederick Douglass. He was born into slavery. He freed himself. And in 1869, he stood up in Boston to speak for people who looked nothing like him.

The target back then was Chinese immigrants. Many Americans wanted them shut out. Douglass said no. He called for a “composite nation” — one people, made from many.

The immigrants would keep coming, he said, the way waves keep coming to the shore. And we would be stronger if we met them as friends. Stronger. Not weaker. That was his word.

Douglass was right. He is still right.

Now think about our most famous symbol of welcome. The Statue of Liberty. She stands in New York Harbor with her torch held high.

Most of us were never taught where she came from: the end of slavery. The men who dreamed her up had fought to end it. In an early design, she held broken chains in her hand. Look closely today, and you will still find a broken chain and shackle at her feet. Most visitors never see them.

She is, at her heart, a statue about people set free. And a statue about welcome. The two ideas were always one.

Which brings me to a film I cannot stop thinking about.

It is called “The Welcome Table.” The filmmaker Josh Fox made it, and it premieres June 23 on HBO. For years he followed families driven from their homes by floods and fires and drought. People the world keeps trying to wall out.

Fox had one simple idea. “A wall, on its side, can be a table,” he says. The thing we build to keep people out can become the thing that invites them in. Same wood. Same length. We only have to lay it down flat.

So he built one. A table a thousand feet long. He gathered families from around the world to sit at it together on a levee in New Orleans. They ate. They sang. They told their stories. They began to heal.

Fox reminds us we have done this before. New Yorkers once feared Italian immigrants. Newspapers drew them as criminals. Today you cannot imagine New York without pizza. Every wave we feared, we later thanked.

Now Fox is taking the table on the road. He is building a movement of house parties across the country. Neighbors gather in living rooms, watch the film, and talk — about who their own families once were, and who they might welcome next.

“Welcoming is a virtue,” Fox says. We have let it slip. He wants us to pick it back up.

That is the choice in front of us. We can keep building walls. Or we can lay them down and set the table.

I know which America I want to live in.

I want the America Alec Baldwin described. The one you join the day you decide to come.

I want the America Frederick Douglass fought for. The composite nation, stronger for its mix.

I want the America the Statue of Liberty was built to be. A free people, making room for the next.

An old saying goes: when you have more than you need, build a longer table, not a higher wall.

So, let’s build the longer table.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.