More Praise for Immigrants

by | Feb 22, 2017

Image result for immigrants google appleMy 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.

About Sheldon Richman

Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He is the former senior editor at the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies; former editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education; and former vice president at the Future of Freedom Foundation. His latest books are Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.

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