It's the People, Stupid
Where the immigration arguments fall off a cliff
Last week a landscape crew arrived at my deceased neighbor’s vacant house. The crew worked for three days, 10-12 hours a day, to clear the unholy mess that had accumulated for decades. The transformation is remarkable. The photo above is taken from my yard. For 23 years, this photo was more or less a wall of trees, stumps, logs and wild vegetation growing around and through piles of junk Now it is a clean, sifted and seeded yard, awaiting a new owner who, God willing, will appreciate it a little more than my old neighbor. It's almost surreal.
The crew that did the work was the classic group of immigrants that you expect to see, completing in three days what it would take me a year to do, even if I had the machinery, and even with my decades of experience with landscape-adjacent work -- I'm not exactly a stranger to a rake and shovel.
With all the rhetoric about uncontrolled immigration (and it certainly can be a legitimate concern), I think it's important to step back for a moment and appreciate the value of hard work and the people who are willing to do it. Work matters. Stuff needs to get done. When it gets done, lives and communities improve.
Our country has a long history of giving families and their descendants an entry point into the American dream, starting with a generation willing to do the things that need to be done. My forefathers were plumbers, stone masons and laborers. They were viewed as the scum of the earth in the early 20th century. But their hard work improved lives and made it possible for me to get an Ivy League education a couple generations later.
I do think we need to understand who we're letting into the country -- the open border fantasy simply doesn't work. And we can't save every persecuted person in the world. But we can use almost as many of these people as are willing to come here, work their butts off, assimilate American culture and build a future for their descendants. That's how we built the country -- and now a lot of it needs to be rebuilt. In all of the worthless bickering about borders and walls and unrealistic policies in the other direction, I think we lose sight of the real issue: We need people. And people are willing to come here to do what needs to be done. It seems to me that we should be managing and leveraging those fundamentals to the great advantage of all, rather than erecting force fields around political issues to win elections.