Once again, every Saturday, Wall Street Journal op-ed writer Peggy Noonan, in her “Declarations” column, articulated my thoughts better than I often can myself. (By the way, she’d make the top 10 of any presidential candidate list I could currently assemble.)

Her August 2 column was titled “Stop the ICE Workplace Raids.” Noonan has long opposed illegal immigration but sees our American spirit contradicted in the recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids taking place in farms, construction sites, restaurants and meatpacking plants. I do too.

Her column acknowledges the work President Donald Trump has done in essentially closing the border, and ridding ourselves of the thugs and criminals who came here illegally. But she also implores the administration to stop its targeting of hardworking immigrants and their employers – both of whom are keys to the engines of commerce. And for everyone's collective well-being …

My formative years in business reporting were spent in the foundry industry. While I’ve been firmly planted in ag for 22 years now, I can say, without hesitation, that much of the American foundry industry of the 1990s would’ve had little chance of survival without the largely immigrant labor who kept those lines moving. I witnessed immigrants doing the jobs that many late 20th-century citizens would no longer take. It wasn’t that wages or earning power were poor; no, quite the opposite. It was because it was hot, hard and often required a change of clothes after a shift.

A different, more entitled generation was conditioned to stay home on their couches with their gaming devices, or maybe flip burgers at McDonald’s until they grew tired of that, too. Thankfully, those jobs were highly valued by those with lesser advantages in life.

A History Teeming of Work-Laden Successes

Our nation’s history is full of dreams fulfilled through honest, though often hard, work. And we all (businesses and communities) enjoyed the direct benefits of their labor – from the apples picked to the parts produced for our cars and everything in between.

I wish I could share Noonan’s entire column with you, but it’s worth digging last Saturday’s paper out of your recycling bin or logging into WSJ’s expansive online library.

She repeated that Trump is out of step with most Americans’ depth of the matter when it comes to those immigrants already contributing to our nation through their work. Trump the businessman should “get” this one. Surely he can identify that a nation’s true wealth creation comes from 3 activities – mining, farming and manufacturing – all of which are in great need of basic labor to carry them out.

In her argument for ICE to quit storming workplaces, she also delivered real gems about work that I wanted chronicled where I’d be able to find them again. This is an important subject for me … As you’ve seen from other “TO THE POINT” columns, I maintain that work is a God-intended gift, and privilege that we get to exercise via a purpose and mission here on this earth.

Noonan noted that Americans are identified with work. “We respect it, and we have an almost mystical attachment to the idea of it,” she writes. “We think ‘hard worker’ means ‘good American.’”

Why do we do it, she asks? “To support ourselves. To belong to something. To build wealth. To be integrated into life, whether we think of it like that or not. To pursue a vocation or be part of an admirable profession. To not be alone.”

Noonan on Work

Here is a sampling of just a portion Noonan’s fine gems this week, on “work” and why it’s worthy of all our respect.

• “When you earn your keep honestly, you are putting something into the world. You are pouring yourself in. It is an act of devotion whether you know it or not. The old Catholic priests used to say “Laborare est orare” — to work is to pray. You aren’t distracted from God when you work; you’re honoring him. It feels soulless only if you forget you have a soul. Work is an act of stewardship. It helps things continue.”
• “The German sociologist Max Weber spoke of the Protestant ethic, in which every honest trade seemed connected to a moral calling. That old ethic met and meshed with the ideals of the American frontier — physical labor, self reliance and giving it your all would make this land and make you.”
• In 1859, Abraham Lincoln put it this way: “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages a while, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and finally hires another new beginner to help him.’ That is how things grow and lives become better.”
• She borrowed from Willa Cather’s novel, My Antonia, to describe the 19th century immigrants who settled the Nebraska frontier. “The narrator, Jim Burden, says Nebraska’s immigrants brought not only an expectation of hard work and the ability to endure it, but also a special kind of cooperation, which he characterized as being a good neighbor in hard times. Their entire lives had been hard times.”
• “In Studs Terkel’s 1974 oral history, Working, he wrote work ‘is about a search … for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.’”

Thanks, Peggy Noonan, for the reminder…

Contributors: The Key to the Argument

The raised torch of Lady Liberty was meant to light the way for those willing to, through sweat and tears, contribute to this new land of ours. That’s a distinction worth making today – the contributors …

No, we should no longer allow the reckless border sins of the past. The objectors to a controlled border can argue for alternative solutions, including but not limited to opening their homes as sponsor to those they weep for; a model of support that was used responsibility and successfully in previous chapters. I attempted to advance this notion through a blog last December, Immigration: Let Business Take Over.

And no, we should not allow raids of clean-record, hardworking immigrants, like the 100 who were carried off in the June raid of an Omaha meatpacking plant. The owner of that business described them as “salt-of-the-earth, incredible people who helped build this company.”

However you feel success on immigration policy “should be” measured, work is the singular common factor that can be counted on. There’s no better assimilation tool than employment itself to offer what Emma Lazraus described, in “The New Colossus,” as the tired, poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Those with honest records of employment and service – who’ve proven to contribute to the American way – deserve grace … and a measured path to permanence.

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