The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [123]
They begin to aspire to something better.
It would be nice if there were thousands of Macs out there, and if the market alone could generate opportunities for all the inner-city men who need them. But most employers aren’t willing to take a chance on ex-felons, and those who are willing are often prevented from doing so. In Illinois, for example, ex-felons are prohibited from working not only in schools, nursing homes, and hospitals—restrictions that sensibly reflect our unwillingness to compromise the safety of our children or aging parents—but some are also prohibited from working as barbers and nail technicians.
Government could kick-start a transformation of circumstances for these men by working with private-sector contractors to hire and train ex-felons on projects that can benefit the community as a whole: insulating homes and offices to make them energy-efficient, perhaps, or laying the broadband lines needed to thrust entire communities into the Internet age. Such programs would cost money, of course—although, given the annual cost of incarcerating an inmate, any drop in recidivism would help the program pay for itself. Not all of the hard-core unemployed would prefer entry-level jobs to life on the streets, and no program to help ex-felons will eliminate the need to lock up hardened criminals, those whose habits of violence are too deeply entrenched.
Still, we can assume that with lawful work available for young men now in the drug trade, crime in many communities would drop; that as a consequence more employers would locate businesses in these neighborhoods and a self-sustaining economy would begin to take root; and that over the course of ten or fifteen years norms would begin to change, young men and women would begin to imagine a future for themselves, marriage rates would rise, and children would have a more stable world in which to grow up.
What would that be worth to all of us—an America in which crime has fallen, more children are cared for, cities are reborn, and the biases, fear, and discord that black poverty feeds are slowly drained away? Would it be worth what we’ve spent in the past year in Iraq? Would it be worth relinquishing demands for estate tax repeal? It’s hard to quantify the benefits of such changes—precisely because the benefits would be immeasurable.
IF THE PROBLEMS of inner-city poverty arise from our failure to face up to an often tragic past, the challenges of immigration spark fears of an uncertain future. The demographics of America are changing inexorably and at lightning speed, and the claims of new immigrants won’t fit neatly into the black-and-white paradigm of discrimination and resistance and guilt and recrimination. Indeed, even black and white newcomers—from Ghana and Ukraine, Somalia and Romania—arrive on these shores unburdened by the racial dynamics of an earlier era.
During the campaign, I would see firsthand the faces of this new America—in the Indian markets along Devon Avenue, in the sparkling new mosque in the southwest suburbs, in an Armenian wedding and a Filipino ball, in the meetings of the Korean American Leadership Council and the Nigerian Engineers Association. Everywhere I went, I found immigrants anchoring themselves to whatever housing and work they could find, washing dishes or driving cabs or toiling in their cousin’s dry cleaners, saving money and building businesses and revitalizing dying neighborhoods, until they moved to the suburbs and raised children with accents that betrayed not the land of their parents but their Chicago birth certificates, teenagers who listened to rap and shopped at the mall and planned for futures as doctors and lawyers and engineers and even politicians.
Across the country, this classic immigrant story is playing itself out, the story of ambition and adaptation,