Day # 162 - Immigrant Values

There was a time when people came to this country looking for an opportunity to earn a paycheck, not just have one handed to them. I know because I witnessed it growing up. I was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Miami and Hialeah. I remember the house I lived in when I started kindergarten: my parents owned it. They had been in the country less than a decade by that point. They still didn’t speak any English. They had low-paying factory jobs – more than one apiece. I like to tell people I grew up in a family that was in banking. It’s true, because my parents moonlighted cleaning banks and since they couldn’t afford a babysitter, they brought me with them. I became a bank robber at an early age, stealing candy from the teller’s candy dishes.

Around the time I was seven, I needed an ear, nose, throat operation. My parents took me in for the surgery, and paid for it by selling their house at a profit and buying a less expensive condo. Eventually they sold the condo and bought the house my mother still lives in. They took 15 years to pay off the house, in spite of the 3 mortgages, one of which was a 30 year deal. They never asked the government to pay for anything. All they asked for was an opportunity. It’s all they deserved. An opportunity is all anyone deserves.

Yet, we live in a time when people want more than opportunities, they want guarantees. There is nothing more dehumanizing than telling a person they are not responsible for their own fate. When we look at successful people, we should admire and even emulate them. Instead, we are told by the “leaders” in Washington that those people somehow cheated their way to where they are and that they don’t pay their fair share (they pay well beyond their fair share – they also create jobs.) Politicians use class envy to keep their jobs, but the other, intended, consequence is that the people they tell these lies to believe what they are told and never reach their potential. They believe the only way to get anything out of life is by coveting that which another man has earned. It’s nonsense and the losers in Washington know it.

If you come to this country (legally) you should have every opportunity my parents had. Every opportunity Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Warren Buffet, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, and millions of others have had. Yes, you deserve the opportunity. No, you do not deserve any guarantees of success. And no, their success did not cause you to fail. There is nothing unfair about it. It is the most fair and perfect thing there is, that a person should reap rewards equal to their effort – no more, no less.

Immigrants of way back when looked for opportunity. They came to America and thanked God for the opportunity. Now, politicians hand them a check, try to make them citizens right away so they can get them into the voting booth, and teach them to throw rocks at the producers instead of becoming one. People have changed, because the system has changed. Rather than coming here and absorbing American values, they come here and try to turn this into the very system they abandoned, not understanding that if they get their wish, the system will, once again, abandon them.

Work for what you want. Don’t expect it to be handed to you. Earn it, so you can appreciate it. Educate yourself, so you can become a person of value.

- Adolfo

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