Opinion | Jeff Flake: We Need Immigrants With Skills. But Working Hard Is a Skill. (original) (raw)
Opinion|Jeff Flake: We Need Immigrants With Skills. But Working Hard Is a Skill.
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Op-Ed Contributor
- Aug. 18, 2017
Credit...Jing Wei
Someone recently said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.”
The man who said that never met Manuel Chaidez.
Manuel was just 16 when he made it from Sonora, Mexico, to the F-Bar, my family’s ranch outside the town of Snowflake, in Northern Arizona. I was just a kid, no more than 6 or so, and to me Manuel looked like a full-grown man. He wasn’t much more than a kid himself, of course, but he worked as if his family depended on him. They probably did. He couldn’t have worked harder if the ranch were his own.
In terms of material possessions, Manuel was an invisible man. His capacity for hard, backbreaking work was his sole credential in life. By no Washington bureaucrat’s estimation would he have been judged a “high-value immigrant.” He didn’t speak much English. He didn’t come from money. He hadn’t finished high school. He had no technological innovation to his credit, nor had he started a business.
In other words, count Manuel among the 99 percent of immigrants who have ever come to this country, including many of our ancestors, the “wretched refuse” who got here as fast as they could and who made this country what it is once they arrived.
All Manuel had to recommend him was his strength and his belief that America was a place where, by the labor of your hands, you could create a life for yourself. That is all, and that is everything. My dad would occasionally hire some of my high school buddies. The work was so hard that they often washed out after a day or two. Not Manuel.
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