From Will Wilkinson's page.
"I'm incredibly proud that the Niskanen Center is at the forefront of the push to open up the U.S. to privately sponsored Syrian refugees. When I was a kid, a refugee family from Vietnam -- Kim Khan, Ai Nu, Bich Lan, and Kim Phuc Thai -- lived in our basement in Marshalltown, Iowa for the better part of year, until they could get on their feet and find a place of their own. Sharing our home with the Thais was a deeply formative experience for me. They could not have seemed more alien to a little Iowa boy. They came to our house with a strange, nasal sing-song tongue and only a few snatches of English. They were sinewy and small. Their skin was dark. Their food smelled and tasted bizarre to my tater-tots palate. They had just escaped the horror of a brutal war in which they had lost everything--something my blithe child's mind, formed in total safety, could not have begun to comprehend. Yet there they were, rounded, real, affectionate, funny, fun human beings. They hugged me. They made me laugh. They gave me Vietnamese Kung Fu comics I couldn't read but could totally understand. This was how I learned that as much as culture and language might divide us, people are fundamentally the same. They were, like my own family, proud people. Each of the adult Thais immediately got SEVERAL jobs (Bich Lan went to school), and saved their cash in a huge roll in a Folgers can. (Who knows when the banks might get nationalized!) In no time, they had their own house, their own cars, started their own businesses. This is how I came to really *believe* that America is a land of opportunity, that it's really open to the tired poor huddled masses, that hard work really pays. I got to see it--total poverty to comfortable America prosperity in just a few years. Most importantly, nothing I ever heard on Sundays and Wednesdays, nothing my parents ever said to me, could have communicated more clearly what it means to be a Christian. People needed help, and we helped them. I can't take any credit for it, but I'm still incredibly proud of it. I'm not even religious any more, but I still feel blessed by it. There are hundreds of thousands of Syrians dispossessed by war. They need help. This is an enormous, hugely wealthy country, with millions of oversized houses with empty finished basements. We can help. We have a chance to be blessed again."
"I'm incredibly proud that the Niskanen Center is at the forefront of the push to open up the U.S. to privately sponsored Syrian refugees. When I was a kid, a refugee family from Vietnam -- Kim Khan, Ai Nu, Bich Lan, and Kim Phuc Thai -- lived in our basement in Marshalltown, Iowa for the better part of year, until they could get on their feet and find a place of their own. Sharing our home with the Thais was a deeply formative experience for me. They could not have seemed more alien to a little Iowa boy. They came to our house with a strange, nasal sing-song tongue and only a few snatches of English. They were sinewy and small. Their skin was dark. Their food smelled and tasted bizarre to my tater-tots palate. They had just escaped the horror of a brutal war in which they had lost everything--something my blithe child's mind, formed in total safety, could not have begun to comprehend. Yet there they were, rounded, real, affectionate, funny, fun human beings. They hugged me. They made me laugh. They gave me Vietnamese Kung Fu comics I couldn't read but could totally understand. This was how I learned that as much as culture and language might divide us, people are fundamentally the same. They were, like my own family, proud people. Each of the adult Thais immediately got SEVERAL jobs (Bich Lan went to school), and saved their cash in a huge roll in a Folgers can. (Who knows when the banks might get nationalized!) In no time, they had their own house, their own cars, started their own businesses. This is how I came to really *believe* that America is a land of opportunity, that it's really open to the tired poor huddled masses, that hard work really pays. I got to see it--total poverty to comfortable America prosperity in just a few years. Most importantly, nothing I ever heard on Sundays and Wednesdays, nothing my parents ever said to me, could have communicated more clearly what it means to be a Christian. People needed help, and we helped them. I can't take any credit for it, but I'm still incredibly proud of it. I'm not even religious any more, but I still feel blessed by it. There are hundreds of thousands of Syrians dispossessed by war. They need help. This is an enormous, hugely wealthy country, with millions of oversized houses with empty finished basements. We can help. We have a chance to be blessed again."