Photo by Michael Vadon / Wikimedia Images

You are hardly a name-brand company if you haven’t dumped Donald Trump in recent weeks.

NBC, Univision and Macy’s all have thrown The Donald under the bus, in the heaviest blow to schlock culture in this country since the cancellation of “Jersey Shore.” The carnage ranges across media, encompassing reality TV (“Celebrity Apprentice”), entertainment properties (the Miss USA Pageant), fashion (the Donald J. Trump Signature Collection) and even fragrance (Success by Trump).

The shunning of Trump is in response to his, uh, memorable presidential announcement that included comments about the alleged rampant criminality of Mexican immigrants — they’re drug runners, rapists, etc. — that were typically crude.

As it happens, Trump’s new enemies are doing him an enormous political favor, at least in the short term. There are few things that benefit a Republican candidate in the current environment of left-wing bullying more than getting fired and boycotted for something he’s said.

Trump’s instantly notorious Mexico comments did more to insult than to illuminate, yet a kernel in them hit on an important truth that typical politicians either don’t know or simply fear to speak. “When Mexico sends its people,” Trump said, “they’re not sending their best.”

This is obviously correct. We aren’t raiding the top 1 percent of Mexicans and importing them to this country. Instead, we are getting representative Mexicans, who — through no fault of their own — come from a poorly educated country at a time when education is essential to success in an advanced economy.

Trump’s comments made it sound as though Mexico is sending us moral defectives. But immigrants are willing to work. Immigrant men ages 18-65 are in the labor force at a higher rate than native men.

It’s just that a lack of education hampers even hard-working people. This is illustrated in an exhaustive report by Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors a lower level of immigration.

Immigrants here from Mexico — which has sent more immigrants than any other country for decades — have the lowest levels of education. Nearly 60 percent of them haven’t graduated from high school.

This puts Mexican immigrants at a disadvantage, and it shows. Nearly 35 percent of immigrants from Mexico and their U.S.-born children are in poverty; nearly 68 percent are in or near poverty. This is the highest level for immigrants from any country. Immigrants make progress on almost every indicator over time, but are still far behind natives after two decades.

For all its crassness, Trump’s rant on immigration is closer to reality than the gauzy cliches of immigration romantics, who are unwilling to acknowledge that there might be an issue welcoming large numbers of high-school dropouts into a 21st-century economy. If we don’t want to add to the ranks of the poor, the uninsured and the welfare-dependent, we should have fewer low-skilled immigrants — assuming saying that is not yet officially considered a hate crime.

The point could be made much more deftly and accurately by anyone not named Donald J. Trump. In the meantime, he fills the vacuum, and enjoys the whirlwind.

— Opinion: Sorry, Donald Trump Has a Point —