Immigrants love the America Dream
Ironically, this past Labor Day weekend, after three dreary days at an academic conference listening to tenured professors denounce the sins of America, I spent an uplifting 15 minutes listening to an immigrant who loves America.
Immigrants like my late grandparents usually do love America because they have another place for comparison, and because they are can-do people crossing oceans to find something better. They don’t whine. They act to make life better for themselves and their kids: When immigrants dislike America, they tend to leave it.
Catching a van to Boston’s Logan airport far too early in the morning, I struck up a conversation with the driver, who fled Haiti for Brooklyn, and then went on to Boston to find opportunity, taking care of his family.
He had been working since 2:15 a.m., and would likely keep at it until late at night, making extra money serving the airport bound professors from my conference, and tens of thousands of college students moving back to their dorms in the Boston area.
I always talk to van drivers and cabbies, at least when they know English and seem to want to talk. They are nearly always interesting, nearly always immigrants, and usually hard-working dads of upwardly mobile children. My loquacious driver had three kids, the oldest just going off to college, just like my son. Any dad can relate. I learned a lot in the 15-minute trip to the airport.
After his daughter faltered in a local public school, he asked friends what to do. Just like my grandparents, strangers in a strange land must rely on personal contacts for information, to figure out how to advance their families. They cannot trust officials.
Unlike many of us who have been here a while, the driver couldn’t afford private school or moving to the suburbs, and likely lacked the clout to get his daughter transferred to a better public school.
Luckily, a friend told him about a charter school, one I had actually read about in a book on successful schools in high-poverty neighborhoods. He signed up his oldest daughter for the school wait list, and in a year she got in. With sibling preference “it was no problem” getting the younger kids into the same school a few years later.
“They make you learn there,” he said. “She attended all charters in grade school, middle school, high school.” What he said next was really interesting.
“They shouldn’t be taking the kids here on trips to Washington or Philadelphia. They should take them to poor countries like Haiti, where the schools have nothing, not even paper, unless you pay for it. People [here] don’t appreciate what they have.”
Amen to that.
Like most immigrants, this fellow left a horror show elsewhere to find difficult opportunities here. He made the most of those, working hard to help himself and his family.
As Jeff Stonecash and Mark
Brewer show in Polarization and the Politics of Personal Responsibility, today’s Democrats and Republicans diverge primarily in their approach toward personal responsibility. Philosophically, the man I talked with is Republican. Unfortunately, due to racial identity politics of the left and increasingly the right, he probably won’t vote his ideals. Neither party wants him.
We parted ways at the airport. The driver went back to serving all those professors and college students needing trips to flights and dorms.
After I apologized for lacking an extra fiver for a decent tip, my driver assured me it was fine. Unlike professors who talk about helping the poor, the college students are actually good tippers.
Like most immigrants, this fellow left a horror show elsewhere to find difficult opportunities here. He made the most of those, working hard to help himself and his family.