Wake up, America. A real invasion is a nightmare — not steady labor | RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.

A dozen years ago, hungry for journalist food, I walked into a neighborhood doughnut shop. There I found two elderly men poring over the newspaper and fretting over their bear claws. Jabbing at a front-page photo of protesters waving Mexican flags, one of the men told his friend with alarm: “This is an invasion!”

Now the human suffering in Ukraine shows that — in their hyperbolic use of the “i-word” — a lot of Americans got it wrong.

Conservatives need to take a good look at the calamity in Eastern Europe. Russia is bombarding its neighbor with everything from armed troops, tanks and armored vehicles to cruise missiles, attack helicopters and a TOS-1 flamethrower that launches “thermobaric” rockets. More than 500,000 Ukrainians have fled, many with just the clothes on their backs.

That is what an actual invasion looks like. And anyone who has used that incendiary word to describe the migration across the U.S.-Mexico border of desperate souls who are dying to cut your lawn, clean your house or wipe your kid’s nose ought to be ashamed.

Just as leftists have overused the word “racist” to the point where it doesn’t mean much, so too have nativists overused the word “invasion.”

Last week, several speakers at the CPAC conference in Florida — including former President Donald Trump — urged the Biden administration to pay more attention to the “invasion” on the U.S.-Mexico border than the border that used to separate Russia from Ukraine.

Sadly, one of the people who put the i-word into our political lexicon was my friend Michelle Malkin, who I’ve debated three times and whose company I genuinely enjoy.

In 2002, Malkin published a book titled “Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores.” At that point, we hadn’t met. But she mentioned me in her book and wrote — inaccurately — that I supported an “open border.”

I do not. The Spanish surname, and my Mexican heritage, probably fooled her. As the son of a retired cop — one who was on the job for 37 years — I consider the enforcement of laws to be sacred.

Having covered the immigration debate for more than three decades, I figured out early on that the United States was not being invaded by Mexico. It’s closer to the truth that Americans are inviting into this country a bunch of Mexican (and Central American) workers to do dirty or dangerous jobs that we won’t do — not at any wage.

Americans don’t have a violent army amassed on our southern border. We have a giant temp agency that supplies us with workers. In fact, it sometimes has trouble keeping up with demand.

You would think that I would not have to explain all this to someone who claims to be a successful businessman.

Steve Gaynor — who is running for Arizona governor — recently discussed immigration on the radio show hosted by Hugh Hewitt.

“In 2022, we are forecast to have 700,000 people cross our border into our state,” Gaynor said. “That’s about 10 percent of the state’s population. That’s why I’ve used the word ‘invasion.’ Because, it’s not a foreign army, but the scale … the amount of people coming across the border and the way that the Border Patrol is dealing with (it), constitutes an invasion.”

Reckless with language, Gaynor calls himself a “constitutional conservative.”

He must have skipped over Article 1, Section 8. Clause 4 gives the federal government, and not the states, the power to establish a “uniform rule of Naturalization,” and Clause 15 gives the federal government, and not the states, the authority to “repel invasions.”

Which might mean something if Arizona were indeed being invaded. It is not. I lived in Phoenix in the late 1990s. That desert metropolis was — over the past 30 years — largely built by undocumented immigrant labor.

Gaynor thinks that, with so many people streaming across the U.S.-Mexico border, Arizonans have lost control.

Baloney. Arizonans still have the ultimate control. They have the power to do their own chores. They can stop hiring undocumented immigrants or refuse to patronize businesses that benefit from their labor.

This requires sacrifice. If undocumented immigrants left because the jobs dried up, Americans would have to do their chores. That would leave less time to sit in doughnut shops and whine about make-believe “invasions.”

Back in the real world, the brave and beautiful people of Ukraine are living through a nightmare. As spoiled and entitled Americans, let’s not insult them by pretending for one second that we can relate to their horror.

Ruben Navarrette’s email address is crimscribe@icloud.com. His podcast, “Ruben in the Center,” is available through every podcast app.