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Oklahoma has 33,000 teachers who are certified, but choose not to teach. Ginnie Graham and Bob Doucette talk about the state's teacher shortage forcing districts to rely on emergency certifications and more. Plus, why are extremists harassing our county election board workers?

Leave it to Ken Burns to point out what America looks like at its best and its worst.

In his three-part docuseries The U.S. and the Holocaust, Burns sheds light on how the U.S. government walked a tight wire of helping Jewish refugees flee Nazi Germany while navigating strong anti-immigrant sentiment at home.

Burns, along with co-authors Lynn Novisk and Sarah Boststein, wrote a piece published in the Tulsa World on Sept. 18 that detailed the ways in which Nazi leadership looked to American laws on immigration policy and treatment of Black and Native peoples to fashion their own framework for what ultimately led to the Holocaust.

That column speaks for itself, so Im not going to get into that here. Instead, I want to look at what has long troubled me about our country: the conflict of its lofty ideals and its sometimes bitter realities.

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My own family history shows just how good America can be to newcomers. My mother came to the U.S. from Germany as the wife of an Air Force enlisted man. She knew little of American culture and didnt speak the language when my parents settled in Virginia in the early 1960s.

She learned the language, worked as a nurse, held plenty of other jobs and had a side business when I was in high school. Her story is one of tens of millions representing immigrants who came to the U.S. and flourished.

Thats one of the things that make America great. When were at our best, we live up to the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, which say in part, Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

The unspoken clause following this line is that these people, leaving dire circumstances in their homelands, can come here and find the opportunity to build a new, prosperous and happy life.

Many have done so. Some work tough jobs and grind out a living. Others start businesses and build empires. Many of their children become entrepreneurs, teachers, physicians, soldiers, researchers and more.

The U.S. has a history of positive assimilation, one where peoples of all nationalities, faiths and ethnicities have sought and found dreams unavailable to them in the countries where they were born.

The U.S. is a microcosm of humanity, something few other countries can boast. We owe that to the high ideals of our founders that everyone is created equal, with unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as written in the Declaration of Independence.

You can see how someone living in a place where rights are fluid, or flatly denied, might be attracted to a country with such egalitarian principles.

I believe this exists here, and get confirmation of that with every story we do on naturalization ceremonies conducted in Tulsa. Each new citizen looks happy to be part of this ongoing American experiment.

Unfortunately, this rosy picture is incomplete. While our ideals are high and success stories real, the relationship we have with immigrants has been fraught with nativism, racism and fear.

For me, that hit home in 2006. Back then, I found myself concerned about how the midterm elections would pan out. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not going well. I worried about what a Democratic takeover of Congress might mean for the country.

Ive long held that the country needs healthy liberal and conservative parties, but some of what I was hearing at the time from the left gave me pause.

I tuned into various pundits, looking for any sort of message that could counter the impending blue wave. Repeatedly, the answer was the same: Bash the immigrants, particularly those from Latin America or anyone hinting of Middle Eastern descent. Predictably, the issue was a loser. Democrats mopped up in the midterms, then took control of the White House two years later. For me, it struck deeper. My faith tells me that were all Gods image bearers. Demonizing foreigners was the opposite of what Christian scriptures teach. I did a lot of reevaluating in those days.

One particular truth stood out: Anyone trafficking in the politics of fear was someone of whom to be wary.

Burns documentary illustrated that. Anti-Chinese laws shut the golden door to people from eastern Asia. Italians, eastern Europeans and more were all, at various times, singled out by strict immigration quotas. Mexican immigrants were welcomed for a time, but they, too, became targets of anti-immigrant fear.

Fear-based persecution wasnt relegated to newcomers. For centuries, Black Americans werent legally recognized as people. Until emancipation, they had no rights. Afterwards, Jim Crow laws sought to claw back rights given to freed slaves and their descendants. Liberated Blacks were viewed by many as a threat.

Native Americans suffered their own horrors, between wars, displacement and relegation to reservations where many tribes teetered on the edge of extinction. Weve barely scratched the surface of confronting those traumas.

During World War II, Americans of Japanese descent were wrested from their homes and confined in bleak internment camps, their loyalties questioned solely on the basis of who they were.

To Burns point, the attitudes that birthed these calamities affected Jews as well. American sentiments toward Jewish refugees in the run-up to World War II were, at best, mildly indifferent. At worst, it was the type of callous spite that deprived beleaguered European Jews of safe harbor here during their hour of need.

State Department resistance toward offering more help cost untold thousands of Jewish lives; had we been more open, Anne Frank and most of her family may have lived out their lives in America instead of dying in Nazi concentration camps.

Id like to think weve advanced beyond those times, but American nativism has never been eradicated. It ebbs and flows.

What do we see now? I still see those stories of new Americans being naturalized in joyous ceremonies. Tulsa owes its new surge of growth and the economic opportunities that come with it to a steady rise in immigrant communities from around the world.

I see a suburban church actively helping Afghans, Burmese, Ukrainians and more begin new lives far from the troubles of where they were born.

But I also watch as politicians preen in front of the southern border, stoking fear of the foreigner. I see them equate undocumented immigrants to thugs and rapists. I hear the term invasion on repeat, even though these same elected officials do nothing about reforming our outdated and cumbersome immigration system.

As a result, all sorts of people end up in the crossfire, targets of violence at stores, synagogues, churches and on the street. All because they look, talk and believe differently.

Immigration reform is needed. The surge of people flooding our southern border attests to that, as do unheeded pleas from businesses that would love to greet a pool of eager new hires.

Such reform is hard. Its far easier to complain than it is to act.

But Id rather try to do the latter. It would mean that while were looking to satisfy our own interests, were also viewing those who want to come here as people and not problems.

And that brings me back to the two-edged sword we wield on immigration. If we live up to the core of our beliefs, America is displayed at its finest. At our worst, when fear guides our actions, we can be deadly cold.

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Bob Doucette: I've seen us at our best - and our worst - on immigration - Tulsa World