If someone with the renown of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has a serious misunderstanding of what a migrant is, is there any wonder many average Americans are still so misinformed about an organized caravan of Central Americans trying to storm into the United States?
Tyson, over the weekend, tweeted that physicist Albert Einstein - he of the E=mc2 theory - "was a refugee to the USA."
That's not exactly the truth.
Einstein, already in the U.S. in 1933 while holding a position at the Institute for Advanced Study, understood he could not return to his native Germany because of the rise of Adolph Hitler and his persecution of Jews like the physicist. Two years later, among many options, he decided to remain in the U.S. and apply for citizenship, which he received in 1940.
The individuals in the migrant caravan have none of what Einstein had - legal status in the U.S. in a job, an inability to return to his country of origin and intentional engagement in the process to become a legal citizen.
On Sunday, the day in which Tyson tweeted, hundreds of caravan members - Mexico put the number at 500, but U.S. officials believe it was higher - tried to scale fences, break barriers and force their way into the country at its Southern border. Some even threw rocks and bottles, eliciting a return of tear gas from U.S. border agents.
"Our agents were being assaulted," U.S. Border Patrol Chief Carla Provost said in an interview on Fox News, "[a] large group rushed the area and they were were throwing rocks and bottles at my men and women, putting them in harm's way as well as other members of the caravan. We needed to disperse the group and with that assaultive nature, it was imperative that we disperse them from the area."
That way of entering the U.S. would have been new to Einstein.
But tear gas at the border? That's not new. In fact, it was frequently employed under the most recent former president of the United States, Barack Obama.
It was used by his administration beginning in 2010, according to the Department of Homeland Security, including 26 times in fiscal 2012 and 27 times in fiscal 2013. It even was used three times in his last full year in office, 2016.
But tear gas wasn't the only device employed. The Obama administration also used pepper spray.
When tear gas was used over the weekend to quell those trying to come into the country illegally, Democrats, immigration-rights advocates and even some Latin American leaders called it "un-American."
A United States senator, Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, alleged U.S. authorities had committed a war crime with illegal chemical weapons.
Yet, the same thing was a nonissue during the Obama administration.
Although some 5,000 to 9,000 migrants - many saying they want to seek asylum in the U.S. - are camping in Baja California, just south of the U.S.-Mexico border, historically only about 10 percent of people in similar circumstances qualify for asylum status under a judge's ruling, according to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
And although President Donald Trump has been mocked for saying so, many in the caravan have more nefarious things in mind.
Reports, for instance, have documented numerous instances of adults abducting children en route, hoping they can take advantage of an Obama-era judge's catch-and-release ruling. While individual adults are more likely to be retained after being caught illegally in the U.S., parents with children - actual or kidnapped - are frequently released, whereupon they disappear into the shadows.
Even the Obama administration suggested kidnappings would increase, but judges weren't persuaded. Thus, according to the Washington Times, abductions have increased 900 percent over 2017.
Among 5,000-9,000 migrants also are bound to be individuals involved in human trafficking and drug smuggling, and violent gang members - some of the types border agents typically see. Indeed, U.S. and Mexican officials have identified some 500 criminals who have infiltrated the caravan.
To deny that such people might be in the midst of others who have a case for truly seeking asylum is to be naive or to be, frankly, unwilling to see.
Others in the caravan have freely admitted they don't want asylum but, instead, want the same things for which others previously came into the country illegally - work and a better life.
Nothing is wrong with seeking work and a better life, but the U.S. has a mechanism for that. It's called legal citizenship. It's a process, and it takes some time. But it's the key to work and a better life, to full participation in being an American, to voting and serving on juries - and not hiding in the shadows.
To put a capper on the point, we turn to that stalwart, right-winger Hillary Clinton, who recently had something interesting to say to The Guardian in the United Kingdom about migration in western European democracies.
European leaders, she said, must stop offering "refuge and hope" to migrants to slow the surge of populism. They must, she added, "send a very clear message - 'we are not going to be able to continue to provide refuge and support' - because if we don't deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.
"I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration," Clinton added, "because that is what lit the flame."
Why, we wonder, would the U.S. not need to heed the same warning?