A SKILL NATIVES LACK:

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.

History doesn't much record the unglamorous and often excruciating work of moving sprinkler pipe, digging ditch, chopping hay or keeping a broken-down feed truck running for just one more year. Manuel did all of that, and so much more (including, one lonely summer, giving me relationship advice as we fixed a tractor on the edge of an alfalfa field). Without such work there is no ranch. Without ranches, my town and towns like it falter. And so in my estimation, Manuel is just about the highest-value immigrant possible, and if we forget that, then we forget something elemental about America.

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