BobK

How cool is this? Immigrant gardeners provide seed money for college scholarships.

For all the blather about immigration, here in a nutshell is the story of how great it is. A guy immigrates from Mexico, he starts a gardening business, saves his money and buys a house on the peninsula (I’m jealous already), and his son graduates from law school at Berkeley. He’s so grateful that he starts a scholarship foundation. This is an immigrant gardener. He’s still a gardener, and he’ll probably always be a gardener. And he has accomplished more than many people who started life will far more advantages.

You hear TV commentators and politicians perpetually invoking the term “the American Dream” in various ways. Sometimes they just apply it randomly to some random desire: “Owning a home is the American dream,” or “job security is the American dream,” or whatever the topic du jour happens to be. It’s an easy artifice… almost anything desirable that you name is something Americans dream of.

But in the story of immigration to America, the real dream has always invoked stories like this one, of modest people accomplishing things in America that they could not have accomplished in their native countries. And his hard work is rewarded, not by his own comfort but by his son’s success.

In many ways, it’s the mirror image of the immigration that my own Greek & Italian ancestors made in the late 19th and early 20th century. At first, it was mostly men, who planned only to earn some money and return home. But as they spent time here, they found it agreeable, they found opportunities that never existed in the old country. The first generation worked as laborers or ran community businesses, bakeries and such. They faced plenty of discrimination from the blueblood descendants of the revolution. There’s a story in the family about seeing signs that said, “Help Wanted, No Italians, No Irish.” Being compared to the Irish was a painful insult indeed. Nonetheless, they persevered, and the following generations succeeded beyond their parents’ horizons. We see that being mirrored today by immigrant gardeners, carpenters, housekeepers, and convenience store owners. Their children will be the leaders of America a generation or two hence.

From the article:

…he tried to describe what prompted him to start the scholarship fund. He sprang up and walked into the den, where Noel’s three diplomas are hung on the wall in great gilt frames: a B.A., an M.A. and a J.D.

“When he got his law degree, I was floating in the clouds,” Tapia said.

To me, that’s been the real American dream: you can come here and do modest work like gardening, but your children will have the opportunity to become lawyers or doctors or whatever else they might desire. It’s an incentive that defies economic evaluation, and it’s a reward for which no material success is a substitute.