My old friend Jon Basil Utley has a well-timed piece in The American Conservative under the applause-worthy title “In Praise of Immigrants.” Utley, who is the publisher of The American Conservative, writes:
“Three new technologies of the last 20 years made America’s economy great again: the iPhone, Google search, and horizontal drilling and fracturing. All came from first-generation immigrants. Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant; Google came from two young men, one a Russian immigrant; and fracking came from the son of a Greek goatherder. There is a simple reason: immigrants, to paraphrase Frankie Laine’s great song, do not have an ‘ace in the hole’—somewhere to get a free meal or a pad for the night. I too was one, from Russia. Immigrants didn’t have any ace in the hole; when I looked over my shoulder there was nothing except, sometimes, an imaginary hungry wolf. My mother got me a good education but as a child, I was among the poorest in almost any group of children. That’s the real incentive immigrants have….
“It’s immigrants who have always been vital for America; yes even the lowly, illiterate Mexican laborers upon which California and much southern agriculture depends.”
Read the whole article here.
