by Bobby Jindal
After the storm we cut red tape and streamlined our state recovery processes. We also put federal recovery dollars toward local governments and rebuilding critical infrastructure, ensuring transparency and strict accountability. The primary focus was on helping our hardest-hit communities complete their recovery efforts.
There’s still a long way to go, but I’m optimistic because I have seen how the great spirit of Louisiana’s people shone through during a catastrophe. First responders saved and evacuated tens of thousands of people and distributed millions of Meals Ready to Eat and liters of water.1
To this day, an array of volunteers and organizations is helping us to rebuild. You see the generosity of the American spirit when you meet families from around the country, like my friend and now governor of Virginia Bob McDonnell, who give up their vacations to come down to Louisiana and help rebuild homes in our battered communities.
In many cases, charities, faith-based groups, and not-for-profit organizations move faster and are more flexible than federal programs. Don’t get me wrong—there is a role for government, which has to build those levees and otherwise ensure our basic safety. And we must acknowledge that the National Guard responded to Katrina with stunning courage and efficiency, as did the Coast Guard, which is estimated to have rescued 33,000 people. But FEMA’s centralized model simply didn’t work.
Thus, we’ve created a bigger role for private citizens to play in future relief efforts. This builds on the tremendous efforts we saw from local restaurants, caterers, cafeterias, and schools and universities, which produced hot meals for evacuees. We are also coordinating efforts with church groups, which cooked thousands of meals for free. Many people would be surprised to learn it’s cheaper (and tastes a lot better) for us to buy a hot meal from world famous chefs like John Folse or John Besh in New Orleans than for FEMA to deliver an MRE.
The story of Katrina is one of tragedy, yes—but it is also one of heroism, of the inspiring examples of individuals who sacrificed all so that others might live.
Craig Fugate, the new head of FEMA under President Obama, has argued that when disasters strike, government has to be prepared to “draft the public.” “We tend to look at the public as a liability,” he told the Atlantic Monthly. “[But] who is going to be the fastest responder when your house falls on your head? Your neighbor.”2 That’s the truth. When disaster strikes, your neighbors are likely to be your best hope—and they shouldn’t have to worry about a bureaucrat standing in their way.
It’s not America’s government that has made America great. It’s Americans. It’s the people who are, at their core, so incredibly uncommon. I witnessed America’s incredible civic spirit countless times in the aftermath of Katrina. And this spirit goes back a long way. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about it in the nineteenth century—about how the “countless little people, humble people, throughout American society, expend their efforts in caring and in the betterment of the community, blowing on their hands, pitting their small strength against the inhuman elements of life.”
We witnessed this same spirit again just a few weeks after Katrina, when Hurricane Rita hit southwest Louisiana, completely demolishing some of our coastal communities.
Once again, masses of people turned out to help their neighbors in need. It is the same courageous spirit that has animated the American soul since our nation’s founding—the spirit that dares us to explore, to build, and to take enormous risks to better ourselves, our families, and our country. When Americans see a burning building and hear cries for help, we don’t run from the flames, but into them. That’s why we are a nation of people who are not just free, but bravely so.
Government needs to acknowledge the incredible feats Americans can accomplish when called upon. Too often government stands not at the side of the firefighter, the police officer, the emergency responder, and the civilian volunteer—but in their path, standing in front of the burning building to say, “Stop! Don’t go in there. Fill out this form first.” Politicians appear on TV a lot during a crisis, but they’re rarely heroic. Certainly nothing I did during Katrina was heroic. All that my staff and I did, or tried to do, was to knock down the barriers between the real American heroes and the people they were trying to save. It’s a travesty those barriers existed at all.
In 2008, three years after Katrina, I was beginning my service as governor, and the first of two hurricanes entered the Gulf. Hurricane Gustav was a menacing storm with strong winds which the National Weather Service told us could be as bad as it gets, possibly even worse than Katrina. Remembering the experiences of Katrina, I quickly decided that we would evacuate all of coastal Louisiana, the largest evacuation in American history. We worked with parish presidents and coastal leaders to issue mandatory evacuations to encourage those who had the ability to evacuate themselves to do so. For the rest, we provided transportation, shelter, food, and medical attention when needed. Ambulances began transporting the medically needy from hospitals and homes to airfields. We faced many obstacles. Buses and ambulances that were promised didn’t show up in time. MREs and tarps didn’t come in sufficient numbers.
So we made do. For example, we commandeered school buses and deployed national guardsmen as drivers to evacuate our people. It was Sunday morning, hours before Gustav’s winds would close the airspace and prevent medical airlifts. We had used the limited ambulances we had to bring patients from New Orleans area hospitals to Lakefront Airport. Governor Rick Perry of Texas dispatched six C130s from the Texas National Guard to fly continuous sorties bringing patients from New Orleans to Texas hospitals. Eventually Northern Command sent aircraft from as far away as Canada, but those first planes from Texas literally arrived just in time and helped us save lives. God Bless Texas.
The final sortie carrying the last patients lifted off less than an hour before tropical winds closed the airspace. We ended up evacuating over 10,000 medical patients across the state, the largest medical evacuation in our nation’s history.
As the second hurricane, Ike, was still flooding Louisiana, I was in a high water military vehicle and headed toward Erath, Louisiana, a small town in Vermilion Parish. Many of the homes in Erath had been flooded just three years earlier, and now the water was rising again. As we approached City Hall we saw sandbags piled everywhere. Having already dispatched a fire and rescue team and the National Guard, I met with local leaders, asking them what else they needed. One of them replied, “Don’t worry about us, Governor. We’ll get control of the water and then we’re going to go Cameron Parish because they got hit harder than we did.” Even as they faced danger, they were worried about their neighbors.
I then went to Cameron Parish and found the same irrepressible spirit. I met a pastor of a church there. “Reverend, how bad is it?” I asked.
“Well, we’re flooded again,” he said. He explained they had spent the last three years rebuilding after getting flooded by Hurricane Rita. And now Ike had hit them just as they were about to hold their first service in their rebuilt church. Ike had done its damage. But then he added with a smile, “Don’t worry about us, Governor. We’ll find somewhere else to worship. Our people are okay, and that’s the most important thing.” And they did rebuild the church.
The pastor knew that where two or more are gathered in His name, He’ll be there. It’s that kind of faith, that kind of resilience, that demonstrates the best qualities of the American spirit.
CHAPTER 8
CONVERTS AND IMMIGRANTS
My dad is a pretty calm guy. But if you want to get him mad, just start bad mouthing America.
You see, my dad is an immigrant to this country. But like my mom, he’s also a convert. They probably love America more passionately than most people born here, because they know what it’s like in other countries where you are defined by your name or the status into which you’re born. They’ve lived in a society that often treated women as second-class citizens, that had widespread, grinding poverty, and that offered less freedom than we have in
America. In short, based on their personal experience, my parents don’t just think America is the greatest country on earth, they know it.
While America’s immigration problems are serious, they show how special this country really is. Think about it: millions of people are voting with their feet to come here. People risk their lives swimming with sharks, they dig tunnels, they risk going to prison, and they sometimes perish in the back of unventilated trucks just to get to America.
Passions are hot on both sides of the immigration issue. Some want to end immigration almost entirely, seeking to blow up the bridge behind them now that they have made it across. Others believe we don’t have any real right to say who can and cannot come here, and think we should open up our borders and grant amnesty to millions of illegals who broke the law when they crossed the border.
The inscription on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,” is a beautiful sentiment. I wish it were as simple to apply it today as it was in past centuries, when we welcomed to our shores just about anyone who could get here. For that matter, I wish we didn’t need heavy security at airports, that we could walk freely through the U.S. Capitol, and that we didn’t have to lock our doors at night. But that is not realistic in today’s world, and I’m a realist who focuses on solutions.
Former Senator Fred Thompson said it well when he noted that we should be a nation of high fences and wide gates. In other words, we need to find a controlled way to continue welcoming immigrants. That approach would require three main things: first, ensure that our borders are secure—not talk about it or study it, just do it; second, enforce our existing immigration laws; and third, refocus our legal immigration policy to encourage high-skilled immigrants who embrace American values. I also think we need to continue to be a place where refugees fleeing persecution, such as those escaping Communist Cuba, can find safe harbor and a new home.
Immigration should help our country compete in the world and improve the quality of life for U.S. citizens while offering unlimited opportunities to hard-working immigrants looking for freedom. That has traditionally been the focus of our immigration policy, but over the past forty years we’ve developed an upside-down immigration system that tempts and even encourages unskilled illegals to sneak into the country while highly educated, law-abiding potential immigrants are turned away. In Louisiana we have a word for this: DUMB.
To the immigrants who came here legally, I say welcome. You are now lucky enough to be living in the greatest country on earth. It’s often said that America is a nation of immigrants, but that’s not quite right. We are a nation where immigrants become Americans. Now, I don’t mean immigrants should strip off every old custom or deny their heritage. Growing up I remember my mom was always interested in what was happening in the “old country,” but she was also heavily engaged in American issues. She never renounced Indian culture, but she became a rabid Dallas Cowboys fan because she loved Roger Staubach. (Don’t worry, this has been remedied, and she is now a card carrying member of the Who Dat Nation.) Growing up, my parents took me to India to meet my extended family, but every summer they would also take me to the great shrines of America—national parks and monuments that offered a rich narrative of our national history.
I’m not suggesting there is a right way or a wrong way to assimilate. However, I do agree with Teddy Roosevelt that we should not think of ourselves as hyphenated Americans but simply as Americans. I don’t much care what people call me, but I don’t like when people ask me where I’m “really” from. I’m from Baton Rouge by God Louisiana. I am an American. Period.
Open immigration was a key concern of our Founding Fathers who, in the Declaration of Independence, charged King George III with “Obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners” and “Refusing to Encourage their Migration hither.” As George Washington explained, “The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges.”1
While encouraging immigrants, our Founding Fathers expected immigrants to learn our language, culture, and way of life. In the eighteenth century, when German immigrants insisted on setting up their own schools and maintaining their own language, Benjamin Franklin complained that “instead of learning our language, we must learn theirs, or live as in a foreign country.”2 Also opposing self-segregation, George Washington argued immigrants should live among native-born Americans to ensure they didn’t “retain the language, habits, and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them.” If immigration were done right, said Washington, “with our people, they, or their descents will get assimilated to our customs, measures and laws; in a word, soon become one people.”3
During the nineteenth century, waves of immigrants came to America from Ireland, Italy, China, and elsewhere, each bringing something unique that has become quintessentially American. Hamburgers and pizza, which were once considered odd, are now authentically American. Hot dogs, thought to have been first introduced by a German immigrant, are now the unofficial food of Independence Day. Indeed, American greatness stems in large part from our unique, astoundingly successful immigration system—a system that now lies in tatters.
Two events occurred in the twentieth century that radically changed who came to this country. The first was the development of the American southwest. Until 1924, the United States did not even have a border patrol—the American southwest was so sparsely populated that few people sought to immigrate there. But California, Arizona, and Texas grew rapidly in the last century, providing an immigration magnate for citizens of Mexico, which remained mired in corruption, poverty, and political instability.
This has created a unique situation—our southern border is the only place in the world where a highly developed country shares a long border with a developing country. Unable to produce enough jobs for its roughly 100 million residents, Mexico is effectively exporting its unemployment to us. As Professor David Kennedy of Stanford University notes, “The income gap between the United States and Mexico is the largest between any two contiguous countries in the world.”4 This dichotomy, occurring across an unsecured border, has created the current immigration crisis, with an estimated 10 to 12 million illegal immigrants now residing in America.
The second development was a growing disconnect between our immigration policies and practices and our nation’s economic interests. Politicians on the Left seemed to want to grant amnesty to millions of illegal and largely less skilled immigrants, while politicians on the Right seemed to want to limit both legal and illegal immigration. Neither seemed to understand the important contribution legal immigration has made and will continue to make towards our nation’s development.
Consider the case of Sanjay Mavinkurve, who holds an H1-B temporary visa for high-skilled workers. Born in Bombay, India, to working class parents, Sanjay grew up loving America. “I admired everything in the way America portrayed itself—the opportunity, U.S. Constitution, its history, enterprising middle class,” he told the New York Times. He came to the United States on a scholarship and attended Western Reserve Academy, a private school near Cleveland. After scoring 1560 out of 1600 on the SAT, he went to Harvard, where he hung an American flag on his dorm room wall. Shortly after graduating with a degree in computer science, he began working as a product manager at Google, where he helped to develop Google News and the Google toolbar. But while Google may be in the Silicon Valley, Sanjay lives in Toronto, Canada. Why? Because his wife, who works in finance, can’t get a visa to live in the United States!5
Shouldn’t our immigration policy increase the skill level of the American workforce? Go to any university or college in America and you’ll see we are educating students from nearly every country on earth. But what do we do right after we train these students in medicine, nuclear physics, engineering, and the like? We kick them out. That’s right
—we turn a blind eye to millions of unskilled workers streaming over our borders, but we make sure to deport budding professionals, people who could add significantly to our nation’s economy and dynamism, people who are inventing the technologies of tomorrow.
Just look at Silicon Valley. The founders of more than half the companies created there over the past fifteen years were born abroad. Immigrants created some of the biggest high tech powerhouses, such as Intel (Andrew Grove from Hungary), Yahoo (Jerry Yang from Taiwan), Sun Microsystems (Vinod Khosla of India and Andreas von Bechtolsheim of Germany), and Google (co-founder Sergey Brin of Russia). An incredible 42 percent of the engineers with master’s degrees and 60 percent with Ph.Ds in engineering in the United States are foreign-born. Comprising 12.5 percent of the American population, foreign-born residents make up nearly 40 percent of high tech company founders.6
The 1990s saw an unprecedented wave of immigration to the United States, with the addition of 13 million foreign-born residents in the U.S., bringing the total to 32 million.7 While the number of illegal immigrants would be drastically reduced simply by securing the border and enforcing existing law, as I explain below, an equally important reform is to overhaul our legal immigration policy to encourage immigrants with needed skills and education. We should not cut the number of legal immigrants we allow into this country—robust immigration keeps our country dynamic, unlike aging, low-immigration countries like Japan—but we can reorient it to bring in those who stand to contribute the most.
Studies show a key determinant in whether the children of immigrants will be successful in America is the educational level of their parents. One study found more than 40 percent of immigrants who enter the country poor are still poor ten years later. This is something new. Back in 1960, immigrants were much less likely to remain poor than native-born Americans. Today they are much more likely to remain poor—and taxpayers foot the bill. A stupid immigration policy will do that.