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SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
When I was a 14-yearold kid in 1977, I rode my bike, played ball with my friends and had virtually no responsibility.
During that same time, halfway around the world, another 14-year-old boy named Tony was dragging dead bodies into the street and setting them on fire.
Tony was born and raised in Beirut. When civil war wreaked havoc on his country, there were lots of dead bodies lying in the streets.
As the bodies deteriorated, they filled the air with stench. So Tony and his neighbors periodically dragged them into the street and burned them.
And I used to complain when I had to clean up after our dog Jingles.
I learned of Tony’s story in 1999, as we became friends while I was living in Washington, D.C.
And his story is incredible.
When he was 17, his family had been forced to flee Beirut. At the airport, they were stripped of their money and belongings and sent on their way.
They settled in Cyprus for a few years and his parents survived by working menial jobs. Eventually, the family got permission to come to America and they settled in Washington.
Tony and his younger siblings had no time to finish high school or think about college. He took a job as a janitor while his siblings worked in a restaurant. They gave all their earnings to their father. After three years the father had saved $20,000 and he said the family should start a business.
Without any prior experience, Tony led the charge. The family opened a bakery. For the next seven grueling years, they worked round-the-clock, sleeping on flour sacks and putting all their profits into the business.
In 1993 the bakery started to turn a profit and Tony’s family began to enjoy the fruits of their labor. But then they lost two big accounts in the same year, burdening them with debt. The family hunkered down again, worked round-the-clock and saved the business.
Today, the family business is flourishing. Through dedication and long hours, Tony and his siblings created a good living for themselves and are now enjoying their version of the American Dream.
And Tony is not alone. You see, in the Washington suburbs of Manassas and Tyson’s Corner, you’ll find $1 million homes all over. And guess who is living in most of them? A little hint: It isn’t middle- manager MBAs.
It’s the wave of newer Americans who came here with nothing. They took jobs as busboys, laborers and many other jobs fewer and fewer native-born Americans are willing to do. They scrimped and saved until they had enough money to build their own businesses.
They own restaurants, dry cleaners, gas stations and other enterprises that generate enough revenue that allow them to live next door to doctors, lawyers and CEOs — as they educate their own children to become the next generation of doctors, lawyers and CEOs.
God knows our immigration system has been a mess for three decades, and it’s never been more chaotic and broken than it is right now.
It’s in desperate need of genuine reform.
All I know is that we all benefit when immigrants like Tony and his family — people who asked absolutely nothing of their new government but the opportunity to pursue their American Dream — find so much success in our country.
We need to pay better attention to them, because they remind us that good things can still happen if all of us enthusiastically re-embrace the American spirit.
