Although I wish Donald Trump crushing defeat in November, I do not wish him ill health. Still, I wish he had occasion to spend a week laid up in the hospital and transitional care, as I did recently following surgery. If he did, even Mr. Trump might amend his thunderous, disparaging opinion of immigrants and Muslims. Lying on a hospital bed, waiting for pain meds and ice water, he'd quickly see that a good many of the nurses and aides helping him are immigrants. Maybe he'd recognize how much he needed them — how much we all do.

My residency in health care facilities was here in Minnesota, where 81 percent of us check "White" on the census form and most of us trace our claims to America back at least as far as Mr. Trump's. His German grandfather, Frederick Christ Trump, steamed over in 1885 to make his fortune, and his Scottish mother, Mary Anne MacLeod, came in 1930 to escape poverty and look for work as a domestic servant.

That's not who's immigrating now. The largest groups of foreign-born Minnesota residents come from Mexico, India, Laos, Somalia, Ethiopia and China. I saw the proof during my week in a hospital bed. Curious about the variety of accents and complexions, I asked my caregivers where they were born. Along with native-born staff, I had nurses and nursing assistants from Burma, Somalia, Eritrea, Liberia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Russia, Belarus, China, Germany, the Philippines. More than half of the folks who helped me were foreign-born.

Beyond health care, Minnesota needs immigrants' labor. State demographer Susan Brower told business leaders in St. Paul recently that the state's labor force is growing by only 8,000 people a year, down from 25,000 a year from 2000 to 2010. A 2013 report from her office showed where that growth comes from: immigrants. Despite our pride in this state, each year Minnesota loses on net 12,000 residents ages 16 to 64 to other states. Only because 20,000 international migrants come to Minnesota each year is our labor force still growing.

Service jobs are one place we need their labor. Of people working in the U.S. as personal care attendants, where median pay is $10.09, one in five is foreign-born. The same is true among health support workers — nursing assistants, orderlies and pharmacy technicians who earn a median of $13 an hour. The white men roaring approval at Trump's promise to "Make America Great Again" are not lining up for that work.

Trump's campaign website highlights his most extreme positions on immigration — building a wall on the Mexican border, banning Muslims from entering the country, tripling the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. His more sweeping statements — condemning current trade and immigration policies, promising to improve "jobs, wages and security for all Americans" suggest a more sweeping nativism and opposition to immigration. In reality, as our native-born workforce ages and shrinks, raising extreme barriers to immigration would harm productivity, prospects for growth and our ability to pay for government services.

There is also the moral question. Should those of us whose ancestors came in earlier waves of immigration shut the doors to new immigrants with darker skin and different homelands? Banning every Muslim for the atrocities of a few is as reckless and unjust as banning all Catholics or blacks, Jews or Japanese, all groups that faced widespread discrimination in the not-so-distant past.

Were Trump in that hospital bed and asked his aides and nurses for their stories, I hope he'd be impressed. The Filipino woman who slowly, patiently took classes to advance from nursing assistant to LPN and now has her sights set on an RN degree. The Liberian aide who goes home after her night shift to get two boys off to school, tend to 15-month-old twins and study for her health management classes. The young Somali aide whose older sister came to the U.S. at 17 and started saving money to bring over her younger siblings. When 11-year-old Fartun arrived speaking no English, her sister hired a tutor who helped her catch up with her class by the time she turned 13.

These echo the stories handed down from my ancestors — fleeing famine in Ireland and finding work on the railroad, collecting junk and sending money back to Germany to bring the rest of the family over. And working hard and seizing education to make a better life for the generations that follow.

Would Trump see the connection? A housekeeper sweeping my room knocked the legs from under that notion: "We've had people like Trump. They treat us like their servants."

She once worked in a fantasy hotel where people could spend $300 a night to pretend they were sleeping in an igloo or tree house. Celebrities would trash the place. They wouldn't leave a tip.

Lynda McDonnell is a Twin Cities writer.