...Your tired, your hungry, your poor...

My friend, Carlos, posted an article on Facebook about four low-income students who made an underwater robot and won a NASA-sponsored contest. The film "Spare Parts" tells their Cinderella tale. But the movie ended in 2004 and life went on in Arizona, where these four young men lived. Brought to the U.S. as children from Mexico, none of them were U.S. citizens. Did I mention they lived in Arizona? One is now a janitor, one a line cook, one was deported to Mexico (he later got a pardon and returned to the U.S.) and one has dropped out of school because the state passed legislation cutting his scholarship funds.

The story made me think of something Thomas Friedman wrote in The World is Flat when discussing what makes the U.S. such an economic powerhouse. He quotes the Indian-born head of Wipro, Vivek Paul, as saying America's "sheer openness" is one of its strengths. Friedman: "We Americans often forget what an incredibly open, say-anything-do-anything-start-anything-go-bankrupt-and-start-anything-again society the United States is. There is no place like it in the world, and our openness is a huge asset and attraction to foreigners, many of whom come from countries where the sky is not the limit."

It would be interesting to learn if America's pull is fading. Hostility to immigrants aside, there's police brutality (Michael Brown, Eric Garner), random gun violence, and the problem of the U.S. health care system. A British woman went into early labor in the U.S. not too long ago and got a $200,000 bill. You know all those stories of Americans having accidents while abroad and being amazed at a $30 charge? It doesn't work that way for anyone visiting the U.S.
1-19