Free Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution by Jeb Bush, Clint Bolick Page B

I am part of that population) is a demographic time bomb that is shaking the sustainability of our savings for retirement, the viability of the entitlement system, and our ability to create robust economic growth.
    Consequently, the Social Security system is experiencing a declining worker-to-beneficiary ratio, which will fall from 3:3 in 2005 to 2:1 in 2040, according to the Social Security Administration.
    All of this brings us to the reason why we have written this book: In order to restore sustained, economic growth going forward, we need a new immigration strategy that opens our doors to young, aspirational people from all around the world, so thatthey can pursue their dreams in our country. The United States of America has always been one of the few countries that can successfully do this. This will require public leadership. It will require breaking out of the gridlock of Washington, D.C. It will require new thinking, focused on the realities and opportunities of 2013 and beyond. I hope this book can help people see that through reforming our immigration system, we can restore America’s promise and greatness.
    Finally, there is little Georgia. My youngest son, Jeb Jr., married his lovely wife, Sandra, a little more than three years ago. She is a Canadian citizen whose parents are of Iraqi nationality and moved to Toronto in the 1970s. Jeb met her in London. Her mother lives in Amman, Jordan, and her stepfather is from New Zealand. My precious granddaughter, Georgia Helena Walker Bush, is going on two now, and she is the joy of my life. Twenty years from now, like millions of other Americans, she will be asked by census takers what her race or ethnicity is. I am certain she will say, “Not applicable,” or, “Not relevant.” But the identity politics that pervades our society currently makes us ask, What is she? By what hyphenated form of “American” should she be called?
    In reality, Georgia is an American with a diverse heritage. Shewill be taught to love her country and all of that rich heritage. (My hope is that she will be trilingual, at least.) Perhaps hers will be the new face of America—a nation that is always capable of changing for the better. But we cannot allow our dysfunctional political system and the political correctness of our times to stymie the great American tradition by which values, rather than race or ethnicity, define what it is to be an American.
    Fixing our immigration system won’t solve all of our country’s problems, even by the time Georgia grows up, but we owe it to the children of her generation to give this challenge our best efforts.

PREFACE BY CLINT BOLICK
    I GREW UP IN THE 1960S AND ’70S in a segregated suburb in northern New Jersey. Many of my friends’ parents or grandparents were European immigrants, mainly from Poland and Italy. But rarely if ever did I encounter a darker-skinned immigrant.
    My brother is fourteen years older than I, and he was a rebel from the beginning. In defiance of my father’s advice, Jerry joined the Marines just as the Vietnam War was heating up. Through a combination of luck and intransigence, my brother managed to serve four years in the Marines in the mid-1960s without being sent to Vietnam. Instead, he spent much of the war in Hawaii,where he met and fell in love with Irma, a second-generation Filipino-American from San Francisco.
    In my eyes, Irma was beautiful and even exotic. Shortly after she and Jerry married, my father died, and my mother, sister, and I moved for a year to the Bay Area, where we were immersed in Irma’s family. In contrast to our own white-bread family, her family was huge, boisterous, matriarchal, passionate, emotional, and demonstrative. To this sheltered and impressionable eleven-year-old from New Jersey, the food seemed as sumptuous as it was strange. The experience was, for me, an epiphany.
    While I attended law school at the University of California at Davis, I worked nights at a convenience store, many of