No sooner had Speaker Pelosi and Senator Schumer, looking dour and standing side by side, delivered their response to President Trump than the Internet lit up with comparisons of the pair to “American Gothic.” That is Grant Wood’s classic painting of the farming couple standing in front of a church. He is in overalls and holding a pitchfork, and both have a dour look.

What an ironical epiphany. For both Mrs. Pelosi and Senator Schumer, coastal ultra-sophisticates, are being pictured as a cartoon of heartland farmers. Grant Wood’s painting was an effort to capture an arch-typical couple in Eldon, Iowa. It quickly became famous when it was first shown in late 1930, Mia Fineman wrote in a review in Slate of a biography of “America’s Most Famous Painting.”

“When the picture finally appeared in the Cedar Rapids Gazette, real Iowa farmers and their wives were not amused,” Ms. Fineman related. “To them, the painting looked like a nasty caricature, portraying Midwestern farmers as pinched, grim-faced, puritanical Bible-thumpers. One Iowa farmwife told Wood he should have his ‘head bashed in.’ Another threatened to bite off his ear.”

That kind of criticism stung the painter, Grant Wood, and he began moving rightward in his own thinking, eventually moving back to Iowa, where he’d been born. What, though, would the Iowans of Eldon make of the current controversy over the “crisis of the soul” of which President Trump spoke last night? Are they with the President or with the Speaker and Mr. Schumer?

It turns out to be not so easy a question. In the presidential elections this century, except 2004, Iowa had gone for the Democrat — until 2016, when Mr. Trump made the border wall a centerpiece of his campaign. He went on to trounce the Democrat, Secretary Clinton, in the general election in the Hawkeye State. Wapello County, which includes Eldon, delivered Mr. Trump even a more solid victory.

Yet 2016 isn’t the only election since Trump put the border wall at the center of American politics. There is also the election of 2018, which created the 116th House. In that election, Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, which includes Eldon, voted by a wide margin for the Democratic incumbent, David Loebsack. He votes in lockstep with the liberal Democrats and favors the Dreamers.

Iowa’s 2nd congressional district, it should be noted, includes Iowa City, largest campus of the University of Iowa. That fills its voter rolls with liberals. In any event, the 2nd district voted for Mr. Loebsack by a wide margin — as did the 1st and 3rd of Iowa’s four districts — in the same election in which Iowa voted for Mr. Trump by a double-digit margin over the candidate of the party that’s now blocking the wall.

Which is but one state’s glimpse of why the blasted border has become such a crisis. The New York Sun’s view is that immigration is self-regulating. By creating a jobs-and-growth boom, Mr. Trump has also created an immigration magnet. So the campaign to curb illegal immigration could be followed by another crisis — a shortage of labor. We’re not far from it at the moment.

So the Sun would give Mr. Trump the wall for which he won a mandate. It’s important to bow to the voters. Yet it’s also important to let the labor market adjust. That might look like President Trump conceding the full DREAM Act in exchange for his wall. Perhaps then some future Grant Wood will paint a new “American Gothic,” a pair of legal Dreamers standing, pitchfork in hand, set against the “Big Beautiful Door” the President has promised.

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Image: From a Tweet by Seth Johnson.