Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution (16 page)

Faithful has several college friends who are undocumented immigrants. She puzzles over the fact that they are eligible for legal status under the deferred-action policy, whereas young people who came legally to the United States face much more uncertain and cumbersome procedures. “Legal immigrants are sometimes forgotten,” Faithful observes. She appreciated Mitt Romney’s comment during the presidential debates that you shouldn’t need a lawyer if you want to come to America.

Faithful Okoye is a good example of why we should not arbitrarily limit the number of foreign students studying in the United States. Despite some frustrating experiences, Faithful has enormous admiration for America. “I would definitely say there is an American Dream,” she says. “What I love about America is I believe there is equal opportunity for everyone. People can be of any part of life and make it.” Faithful thinks the experience of foreign students increases their respect and appreciation for the United States.

Regardless of whether Faithful resolves to become an American
citizen or return to Nigeria, her opportunity to learn in America will make the world a better place.

If anyone would have cause to feel antipathy toward illegal immigrants, it would be Julie Erfle, whose husband was killed by a criminal living illegally in the United States. But instead Julie exemplifies the sensitivity and compassion that are critical to resolving the immigration debate.
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Julie and Nick grew up in the same small town in North Dakota, attending school and church together. They started dating in high school and were married during college. Although Nick had a rebellious streak, he decided he wanted to become a police officer. “It was a bit of a shock to me,” recounts Julie. After earning a two-year degree, Nick applied to the Phoenix Police Department and was accepted. Despite having almost no money, they moved to Phoenix in the summer of 1998, where Nick went through the police academy and Julie obtained a position at a local television station.

Nick always worked street patrol, usually volunteering for
the late-night third shift. “He loved it,” Julie recalls, “because that’s when everything happened.” Nick worked a community beat and made a large number of felony arrests.

The couple had their first child in 2001. Three years later, Nick was diagnosed with early-stage testicular cancer. He had surgery and only lost three weeks of work.

A year later, the cancer returned. It was stage 3 and had spread to his lungs and abdomen. Following chemotherapy, the cancer was determined to be in remission. Nick couldn’t return to his beat but worked desk duties.

But again the tumor returned. This time Nick had major surgery, followed by a long and painful recovery. The surgery had damaged his intestines and he suffered a massive infection, causing him to lose sixty-five pounds. His health kept getting worse and he nearly died. Finally in September 2006, Nick returned for additional surgery, which successfully dealt with his remaining health issues.

Within a month he was back at work, and on Thanksgiving he returned to patrol duties. He sent an email to his family reporting, “The streets of Phoenix have been waiting for me, I made three arrests on my first day back.” By then he and Julie had two children, ages two and five, and they were grateful to have their
dad back. “That last year of his life was a gift that almost wasn’t,” Julie remembers.

Less than a year after his return to the streets, Nick had just switched squads and was reunited with a former partner. On the night of September 18, 2007, they had just booked a suspect and were back on patrol. They saw a young man and two women jaywalking recklessly across the street. The man bore gang insignia.

Nick and his partner stopped the three people. While Nick questioned the women, his partner questioned the man, who gave him a fictitious name that, ironically, had an outstanding warrant attached to it. While Nick radioed in the information, his partner tried to arrest the male suspect, who pushed him to the ground. Nick went to his partner’s aid and the suspect shot Nick. He then tried to shoot Nick’s partner but missed, then shot Nick again. The suspect’s gun jammed and he fled the scene, carjacking a car at gunpoint. A bus driver called in the license plate number and the killer was apprehended an hour later by a SWAT team that found him with a hostage. The SWAT team shot and killed the suspect.

Both of the shots fired at Nick Erfle were fatal, and he was pronounced dead shortly after the shooting. The killer was identified as Erik Martinez, an illegal immigrant who previously had
been deported for assault and had an outstanding felony arrest warrant.
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Nick’s death “didn’t make sense,” Julie says. “Why would we go through everything we did for him to die this way?”

But even as the family grieved, combatants in the war over immigration that was raging across Arizona tried to press Julie into service. Julie always had been politically interested but not involved. “It didn’t affect me up to that point, or so I thought,” she says. Now she was caught in the political crossfire between police chief Jack Harris and the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association (PLEA), which were on opposite sides of the issue. She considered the fight “very destructive,” and PLEA was disappointed when it learned that Julie didn’t share its hard-line views. That didn’t stop politicians from invoking Nick to raise money, Julie recounts, even though they had no idea what his views were on immigration.

Julie decided to try to improve the Phoenix Police Department’s operations order that forbade officers’ asking about immigration status when they made a stop. Nick always had been worried about knowing who he was dealing with whenever he made a stop. In particular, illegal immigrants with outstanding warrants were a threat because they were desperate and didn’t
want to be deported. Ultimately he lost his life to precisely such a person.

But Julie resisted siding with one extreme or the other. Instead, she educated herself on the issue and met with immigration lawyers, faith leaders, the head of the Chamber of Commerce, and others. “It made me realize there were lots of solutions out there and lots of people had been working on it for a long time,” Julie says. But the reforms she and others proposed were torpedoed by a small group of opponents.

From that experience, Julie went on to fight Arizona’s S.B. 1070, which she feels “does nothing to fix what is fundamentally broken in our immigration system.” We can’t have safe communities, she believes, if people are afraid to talk to police officers because of their immigration status, which in turn makes police officers’ jobs more dangerous.

Julie has helped organize the Real Arizona Coalition, which brings together business, faith, civil rights, and law enforcement leaders to find solutions to immigration issues. The coalition, which includes Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, has developed an immigration reform plan that Julie and her colleagues hope the state’s entire congressional delegation will champion, placing Arizona at the forefront of immigration reform.

Many Arizonans know undocumented immigrants who share their values, work hard, and raise good families. There should be a way, Julie hopes, to give them a legal status. “I’m optimistic about what’s happening in Arizona,” she declares. Julie Erfle’s ability to derive hope from heartbreaking tragedy is an inspiration to all of us who want to find enduring solutions.

Like many American success stories, Shahid Khan’s story begins outside the United States. Born to a middle-class family in Pakistan, Khan came to Illinois forty-six years ago to pursue an engineering degree at age sixteen, with just five hundred dollars to his name.
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After spending three dollars for his first night at a local YMCA, Khan despaired that he would run out of money. Then he discovered he could earn it back in only a few hours by washing dishes. “It’s like wow,” he recalls. “If you put the $1.20 per hour in terms of Pakistan, you’re making more than ninety-nine percent of the people over there. I’m breathing oxygen for the first time.”

After graduating, Khan became an engineering manager at Flex-N-Gate, a local aftermarket car parts company. He developed a revolutionary car bumper and eventually bought the company.
Through innovation and daring, he built the company into a multibillion-dollar business. By 2011, Flex-N-Gate parts were in more than two-thirds of the 12.8 million cars sold in America. The company employs thirteen thousand people, in fifty-two factories around the world. Khan’s net worth places him in the top half of the Forbes 400.

But building a business was only part of Khan’s American Dream. Last year, he purchased the Jacksonville Jaguars professional football team for $770 million, becoming the National Football League’s first minority owner.

Making the Jaguars a financial success might represent an even greater entrepreneurial challenge than building an international auto parts manufacturing company in the ashes of the Rust Belt. Jacksonville is the fourth-smallest market in the league and the team hasn’t won a division title in more than a decade. In a recent ESPN survey, only .4 percent of respondents identified themselves as Jaguars fans, last in the league.

With typical innovation, Kahn launched a marketing campaign that includes developing an international fan base. Starting in 2013, the Jaguars will play one “home game” in London for each of the next four seasons. He knows it won’t be easy, but the challenge motivates rather than deters him. In America, he says,
“You can do anything you want to do. You have to work hard, you have to create your own luck, and you have to have some luck also. But here, it’s possible.”

As
Forbes
magazine noted in its profile, “Khan’s is the kind of only-in-America success story that has filled boats and planes with dreamers for the past 150 years, one that gives face to an ironclad fact: Skilled, motivated immigrants are proven job creators, not job takers.”

Immigrants bring enormous wealth, skills, effort, and ideas to our nation. We need to fix our immigration policy so that millions more enterprising men and women can follow the footsteps of Shahid Khan and so many who came here before him to earn their share of a universal dream: the American Dream.

These stories just scratch the surface of America’s contemporary immigration experiences. Over the course of our history, countless immigrants have come to our country and enriched our culture, our economic opportunities, our politics, our understanding, our future. Many of them return to their native lands, usually remembering Americans and their nation fondly and helping build
peaceful international relations. Many others remain here, earning citizenship and pursuing the American Dream. Fortunately, many more still aspire to follow in their footsteps.

Immigrants have made so many contributions to America that it is impossible to recount them all. They are absolutely necessary to our future prosperity. But perhaps more than anything else, immigrants are essential for reminding us how special our nation is, and how hard it is to maintain freedom. Immigrants validate American ideals through their determination to make a better life, the courage to leave the familiar for the unforeseen and the selflessness to embrace something bigger than themselves.

They show us, not through mere rhetoric but their determination to become Americans, just how precious those ideals are.

I
T WOULD BE DIFFICULT TO
write this book without including a chapter on education. Just as comprehensive immigration reform is essential to our nation’s future and its economic well-being, so too is fundamental education reform.

In fact, the topics are very interrelated. The current state of K–12 education in America impacts immigration policy in two distinct and important ways: First, one of the main reasons we need large and increasing numbers of high-skilled immigrants is that our nation’s schools are not producing well-educated graduates—especially in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—in anything approaching the numbers we need to
sustain and grow our economy, much less to maintain our leadership in global technology. The United States ranks 25th out of 34 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading.
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That performance simply will not do in a highly competitive global economy. Second, many immigrants, especially Hispanics, lag substantially behind in educational achievement

The problem is not insufficient funding. The United States ranks second only to Switzerland among OECD countries in student spending during their primary and secondary schooling. That spending (including federal stimulus funding to hire 10,000 new teachers) has reduced student/teacher ratios without improving outcomes.
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Among OECD countries, America’s academic performance most resembles Poland’s, a country that spends less than half the per-pupil amount we do on K–12 education. Moreover, only 8 of the 34 OECD countries have lower graduation rates than ours.
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Just as the problems overlap, so too do the solutions: we need a market-driven system of immigration, as well as a market-driven system of education.

Our education system fails to prepare sufficient numbers of students for higher education or careers in the professions we
most need in a global twenty-first-century economy. When there are higher education levels in the labor force, there is an increase in both the level of economic output and the rate of economic growth. Our immigration system must be changed in multiple ways to allow us to attract the best and the brightest students, workers, and entrepreneurs from around the world. But, of course, we would not need nearly so many immigrants if we were able to produce more highly skilled American students, workers, and creators.

There is also a second education challenge: the failure of our education system to provide high-quality opportunities for immigrant schoolchildren. That problem hardly is unique to immigrant children, but extends to millions of economically disadvantaged children, who are disproportionately minority. Indeed, even accounting for high dropout rates, black and Hispanic high school seniors score on standardized tests at roughly the same level as white eighth graders, a racial gap of four academic years that has persisted despite increased school funding and reforms such as decreased class sizes.
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