The Neighbor

The shingles were hot enough to burn through his knees if he stopped moving. July in Leavenworth and the sun hit the roof and the heat came off in waves you could see rising like water that wasn’t there. He was skinny. Wiry. The kind of thin that doesn’t come from a gym. It comes from being on a roof in Kansas every day for years until the work carves you down to what’s essential and everything else burns off.

He moved well up there. You don’t notice a good roofer until you watch one. The way the body knows where the pitch changes, the way the hands find the nail gun without looking. He was good at his work. You could see that from the ground.

He lived above the great river. In the evening, he walked down the giant hill to the beer store. Not drove. Walked. He came back with a couple of tall boys, and he sat in the symphony of cicadas and evening glow and drank them. In the morning he went up on somebody else’s roof. Six days a week. Before I lived next to him, and after I left.

He was a good neighbor. Quiet. Didn’t bother anybody. Had the sense not to drive after he’d been drinking. I never asked for his papers. It didn’t occur to me to. Little kids would play around his yard. He would drink his beer, listen to the cicadas, and go back to work. Some nights he dreamed. I don’t know what about. Probably the things men dream about when they’re far from where they started. I knew what I needed to know about the man.

I don’t know where he is now. Maybe still in Leavenworth. Maybe he went home. Maybe ICE pulled him off a roof last year and put him on a plane. I think about him sometimes. Not because his story is tragic. It isn’t. His story is the story of the purpose of life.

Eat and drink with those you love, and enjoy your work.

A man who does hard work and drinks a beer after and goes to bed and gets up and does it again. There are millions of stories like his, and that’s the point.

The tragedy isn’t his. It’s ours.

Act I. The Roofer

We have a wound. It’s been open for forty years.

It’s rot. Gangrene. We want the roofer on the roof. We want the cheap shingles. We want the restaurant meal and the picked lettuce and the framed house.

We won’t decide what we owe the people who do the work.

Do we look at him drinking his beer in the evening and ask what we owe him? Want his kids in our schools? Hospitals? Do we count him in the census or plan for his kids or acknowledge that he’s been here for forty years and he’s our neighbor?

Do we punish the businesses that hire him?

In 1986, a young man crossed a border. Maybe he walked. Or rode in the back of something. He was thin even then, probably. Nineteen or twenty. He found work on roofs because nobody asks for papers on a roof. The sun and the shingles and the years carved him down to what you saw from the ground in Leavenworth. A man made of wire and work.

That same year, a president looked at three million people just like him and said the honest thing. They’re here. They’re being abused. Anybody who’s here illegally is going to be abused in some way, either financially or physically. Those are the words of a conservative Senator, talking about a Republican president.

Reagan treated the wound. He signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. Offered legalization. Toughened employer penalties. It was imperfect.

It was unpopular.

Maybe the roofer got his papers that year. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t understand the process or didn’t trust it or couldn’t get to the office or didn’t know the window was open. Three million people and not all of them made it through the door.

But the door was open. That was the last time.

Forty years ago. The wound was three million people.

Nobody treated it again. Not the next president or the one after that or the one after that. Every Congress looked at it and saw how unpopular it read in the papers and said later.

When we break it down, there is no Congress. There is ‘we.’ ‘We’ are the people. We are Congress.

We need courage. The easy thing was to talk tough or talk compassionate depending on the audience and do nothing real. So the wound grew. Six million. Eight million. Eleven million. The flesh going gray at the edges.

The roofer kept working. He got older the way men who work outside get older. Not soft. Stiff. The sun took the back of his neck first and then his forearms and then everything the shirt didn’t cover turned to leather. His knees learned the pitch of every style of roof in eastern Kansas. Some mornings they wouldn’t bend right until he’d been up there an hour and the heat worked into them. He stayed thin because the work kept him thin. The weight never came because there was nowhere for it to go. The body was still doing what it was built for. It just cost more to do it.

He didn’t need the country to decide. He’d already decided. He was staying. He was working. He was living the purpose of life.

The country was the one that couldn’t make up its mind. And a wound you won’t decide to treat is a wound that decides for you.

Act II. The Surgery

And then we tried to amputate.

The largest deportation effort in American history. The most money. The most agents. The most political will any administration has ever brought to this. We doubled the ICE workforce. Twelve thousand new agents. Over 1,200 agreements with state and local law enforcement. Detention capacity pushed to nearly 70,000, the highest America has ever seen. National Guard deployed. Door-to-door operations announced. Billions committed.

We swung the blade. Here’s what it hit.

The Brookings Institution tracked the results. Actual deportations in 2025 came to roughly 310,000 to 315,000. Under Biden’s final year, the number was 285,000. The largest enforcement operation in American history moved the needle about thirty thousand people. The administration claimed 2.2 million self-deported. Internal government figures obtained by CBS News showed official tracking recorded about 13,000 in the first six months. Brookings estimated somewhere between 210,000 and 405,000 left voluntarily above the normal baseline.

Be generous. Call it half a million to 700,000. Deportations and voluntary departures combined.

We started with around eleven million undocumented immigrants. Ten million people are still here. The roofer is probably still here. The wound is still open.

We spent billions to move the needle thirty thousand deportations beyond what the previous administration achieved without the raids, without the National Guard, without the door-to-door operations. Without the Americans shot in the streets. Thirty thousand. On a population of eight to ten million. That’s no more than a rounding error with a budget.

But the cost wasn’t only money. The blade didn’t just miss the target. It cut the wrong tissue.

ICE arrests quadrupled. But arrests of people without criminal convictions increased sevenfold. The machine we built to find dangerous criminals like the cartel operatives, the traffickers, the genuine threats, pointed itself instead at roofers and dishwashers and farmhands. Not because those people were dangerous. Because the operation needed bodies to justify its scale, and the roofer is easier to find than the cartel operative. The roofer is at work. On a roof. He’s where he always is. He’s not hiding.

We chose weakness. We fought the wrong enemy on the wrong ground. Every agent who pulled a roofer off a job site was an agent not chasing a trafficker. Every bed in a detention facility occupied by a dishwasher was a bed not holding a threat. We had limited resources and we spent them on the people who were never the problem, and the people who were the problem watched from wherever they watch.

Federal judges found that ICE violated hundreds of court orders. Missed deadlines. Deported people after courts issued injunctions. Transferred detainees in defiance of judicial rulings. The Board of Immigration Appeals was shrunk by nearly half and packed with appointees who ruled for the government in all but one of twenty-one published decisions in 2026. The one they lost involved an immigrant withdrawing his own appeal.

We sent people to countries they’d never seen. A Guatemalan man was deported to Mexico two days after telling a court he’d been abducted and raped there. Eight men were told they were being transferred between facilities in Texas and Louisiana. The plane flew to Djibouti. A Senate report found we were paying more than a million dollars per person for some of these third-country deportations to nations with documented records of corruption, trafficking, and abuse.

An eleven-year-old girl in Gainesville, Texas, killed herself after classmates told her ICE was coming for her family.

A thirty-year-old man named Wael Tarabishi, diagnosed with Pompe disease, died after ICE detained his father, who was also his primary caregiver. The family pleaded for his release. Wael died on January 23, 2026.

Nearly half of all immigrants surveyed, including naturalized citizens and legal permanent residents, said they feared detention or deportation. Fourteen percent stopped going to church. Ten percent stopped taking their children to school. Five percent stopped going to work.

The fear didn’t stay in immigrant homes. It reached into the homes of citizens. Into families with mixed status. Into neighborhoods where people stopped answering the door. That’s what gangrene does. It doesn’t stay where it starts.

So the surgery failed. The blade missed. The wound is still open and now there’s new damage from the cutting.

Why?

Not because the agents didn’t work hard. They did. Not because the courts blocked everything. The courts did what courts exist to do, which is hold the government to the Constitution.

It failed because we tried to cut away the symptom without diagnosing the disease. Milton Friedman said it plainly forty years ago.

We can have free immigration. Or we can have a generous welfare state. We cannot have both.

Before the New Deal, before the Great Society, before Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, immigrants came and nobody argued about it much. They came, they worked, they sank or they swam. There was no public resource pool to strain. No safety net to access. The math worked because the equation had two variables: labor in, labor out.

The social safety net added a third variable. Now there are public systems supporting healthcare, education, housing, and food assistance, that cost money and serve populations. And a person who works and pays sales tax and property tax through rent but doesn’t have a Social Security number doesn’t fully enter the tax base that funds those systems. The community bears the cost and can’t plan for it because it can’t count the people.

Before you turn off and say it’s hateful, we are going to get past it. But it’s real. Not nativist. It’s arithmetic. And the people in border communities who feel that strain aren’t imagining it.

But the answer to the equation isn’t deportation. You don’t solve a math problem by pretending one of the variables doesn’t exist. The roofer exists. Eight to nine million people exist. They’re in the economy. In the schools. On the roofs and in the kitchens and on the job sites. You can’t deport your way to a balanced equation.

We spent billions this year to deport people and achieved nothing.

The answer is to solve the equation. Account for both sides. Design a system where the people who do the work enter the tax base fully, where their contribution is counted, and their cost is planned for, and the math works for the communities they live in.

Nobody has done that. Not because it’s impossible. Because it requires the one thing we’ve refused for forty years.

The courage to make a decision.

The roofer didn’t ask for a welfare state. He didn’t ask for Medicaid or food stamps or housing assistance. He asked for a roof to work on and a beer store within walking distance. He held up his end. He worked. He paid sales tax every time he bought those tall boys. He paid property tax through his rent. He probably had payroll taxes taken from a check written to a Social Security number that wasn’t his, paying into a system he’ll never draw from.

He held up his end. We didn’t hold up ours.

Our end was to decide. To look at the equation honestly and legislate an answer. To say: you’re here, you’re working, here’s what you owe and here’s what you’re owed. To open a door like Reagan opened a door and do the hard, unpopular, courageous thing that governing requires.

We didn’t do it. Not because we couldn’t. Because we wouldn’t. And now the wound is eleven million people deep and the gangrene is past the knee and we’re still lying on the cot, cataloging excuses.

There is a door we could open. We could actually solve the problem. It won’t be popular. It wasn’t popular in 1986 either.

Act III. The Door

There is a door we could open. But before we open it, we have to say the thing out loud that nobody in Washington will say.

They’re here. They’re staying.

Not because we agree that we want them to. Not because we’re giving up. Because we tried everything else. We spent the money. Hired the agents. Built the beds. Doubled the workforce and deputized local police and flew people to countries they’d never seen and violated court orders and sent the National Guard and announced door-to-door operations and did every single thing that was promised.

And more than ten million people are still here.

This is not a policy preference. It’s a physical reality. You cannot move ten million people who are embedded in the economy, in communities, in families with American-born children. You cannot do it with 70,000 detention beds when there are ten million people. You cannot do it with 310,000 deportations a year when the population replaces itself through birth and arrival faster than you can remove it. The math does not work. It has never worked. No nation in human history has achieved it without methods Americans will not and should not tolerate.

So the choice is not between deportation and something else. Deportation is off the table. We took it off the table by failing at it as completely as a nation can fail at something. The choice is between the status quo of ten million people with no status, no number, no legal existence, invisible and exploitable and uncountable, and something honest.

We don’t have to open the door because we’re generous. Every other door is painted on the wall. Our choice is to sit in the dirt and cry, or open it.

The door starts with a number. A real one. One that says: you’re here, you’re working, we can see you.

Not amnesty. Not citizenship. Not a reward for breaking the law. A decision. The decision we’ve refused to make for forty years.

We could call it legal economic residency. A new category for a reality that already exists. Because the roofer already lives here. Already works here. Already pays taxes here. The only thing he doesn’t have is a status that matches his life. We’re not changing his reality. We’re catching the paperwork up to it.

Here’s what it means. A legal status and a tax ID. His own Social Security number. A real one, in his real name. Payroll taxes withheld like any other worker. Full protection under labor law. OSHA covers him. He can go to court. An employer can’t hold deportation over his head to keep him at slave wages. He’s visible. Countable. Communities can plan for him because they can see him.

Here’s what it doesn’t mean. Not citizenship. Not voting. Not a fast track ahead of anyone who followed the legal process. And for ten years, no access to the social programs that make the Friedman equation unsolvable. No Medicaid. No food assistance. No housing assistance. No Social Security benefits. For ten years he pays in and doesn’t draw out.

After ten years of economic residency, ten years of showing up, paying in, following the rules…then he can apply for permanent residency through the normal legal process. At that point, his Social Security credits start accumulating. Forty quarters from there. Another ten working years to vest.

Twenty years. Ten to prove he belongs here. Ten to earn the same benefits any worker earns.

Is that fair?

No. None of this is fair. It wasn’t fair when he crossed at nineteen because there was no work where he was born. It wasn’t fair when the door opened in 1986 and closed before he got through. It wasn’t fair when he paid into Social Security for forty years under someone else’s number and will never see a dime of it.

But it’s honest. And it’s not unusual. In France, a foreign worker needs ten years just to qualify for a partial pension and forty years for a full one. And if your paperwork isn’t in order when you apply, they deny you everything, no matter how many years you paid in. Our deal is more generous than what the French offer, and nobody calls France cruel on immigration.

The roofer is fifty-eight. Under this system, he’d be sixty-eight at permanent residency and seventy-eight before he vests into Social Security. He probably never sees a full retirement check. He knows that. He’d take the deal anyway. Because the deal isn’t about retirement. It’s about his name. His real name on a real number in a country that finally stopped pretending he wasn’t there.

Twenty years is a long time. But it’s shorter than the forty he’s already waited for a country to make up its mind.

So, you’re right. It’s not fair. Fair left the arena a long time ago.

What this is, is honest. It’s the Friedman equation solved on paper. Millions of people paying into Social Security and Medicare for a decade before drawing anything out, at exactly the moment those systems are headed toward insolvency. That’s not a cost. That’s a net contribution. The roofer doesn’t drain the safety net. He funds it. For ten years, he funds it with no return.

The fiscal hawks need to hear that number. Run it. Eight to nine million people entering the payroll tax system with a ten-year delay on benefits. It might solve the Social Security funding problem on its own. The Congressional Budget Office can model it. I’ll wait.

To the people who say it’s not fair to the roofer. You’re right too. But the roofer has been paying in for forty years and getting nothing. At least this way he’s paying in under his own name, with legal protection and a date on the calendar when the account opens. That’s more than he has now. More than he’s ever had.

But ten years is a long time. And we need to let some people choose to serve and earn it faster.

Between ten and fifteen percent of immigrants are military veterans. All of them raised their right hand and sworn an oath to the Constitution. Some of their parents spoke poor English or no English at all. But their children stood in uniform beside me and served the nation.

There is a long tradition in this country of earning your place through service. Not just military. The Civilian Conservation Corps put three million young men to work during the Depression building roads and bridges and parks, and nobody questioned whether they belonged afterward. They’d built the country with their hands. The country was theirs.

Economic residency is the baseline. Ten years. But national service is the accelerator. Six years of qualified service, meaning military, infrastructure, conservation, disaster relief, rural healthcare, or elder care count as ten.

You’ve served the soil.

That phrase isn’t a metaphor. It connects to the deepest constitutional logic we have. Jus soli. The right of the soil. The principle that American identity is rooted in the land. Born on it, bound to it, willing to work it and defend it and build on it. We wrote it into the Fourteenth Amendment. We wrote it into the requirement that only natural-born citizens can serve as president. The soil endows rights.

And service to the soil earns them. Not by blood. Not by birth. By work. By showing up for six years and building roads or caring for the elderly or clearing disaster debris or staffing a rural clinic that can’t find enough hands. The roofer has been serving the soil for forty years, one roof at a time. Give him credit for it.

Now the employer.

This is the part nobody wants to talk about and everybody needs to hear. The roofer didn’t hire himself. Someone handed him a nail gun and paid him cash or paid him through a number that wasn’t his and looked the other way. That someone benefits from the arrangement. Cheaper labor, no benefits, no questions asked. And that someone has been doing it for forty years while we argued about the roofer on television.

Agriculture. Meatpacking. Construction. Hospitality. Entire industries built on labor they won’t legalize. Everyone knows it. The left knows it. The right knows it. The donor class on both sides profits from it. This is why the equation never gets solved. Not because it’s hard, but because the people who write the checks don’t want it solved. The shadow economy is cheaper than the legal one, and cheap has a constituency.

So here’s the deal. A twelve-month window. Every employer in the country gets one year to register their undocumented workforce and transition them to economic residency payroll. Real names. Real numbers. Real withholding. Full labor law compliance. During that window, no penalties. It’s an amnesty for the employer, not the roofer. You looked the other way for forty years? Fine. The window is open. Get to it.

After twelve months, the window closes. And what comes through the other side is criminal. Not fines. Not paperwork. Criminal penalties for hiring undocumented labor. Steep enough to change the math. Whistleblower protections strong enough that the dishwasher can report the restaurant without fear. Enforcement funded and relentless.

You want to reduce undocumented immigration? This is how. Not by chasing the roofer across Kansas. By making it impossible for the business owner to profit from his invisibility. Turn off the demand and the supply adjusts.

One more piece. The burden can’t stay where it is.

Right now, border states absorb the weight. Texas. California. New York. Arizona. The roofer might live in Kansas, but millions like him are concentrated in states that bear the cost of services, education, and emergency healthcare. The real cost of a population they can’t plan for because the people have no status and no number.

That’s a geography problem, not an immigration problem. And we can solve geography problems.

State-level sponsorship compacts. Wyoming needs ranch hands and energy workers. Iowa needs labor in meatpacking. North Dakota needs bodies in the oil fields. States opt in based on their own labor needs, set their own caps, define their own integration requirements. Language benchmarks, civic education, whatever the state decides. Economic residents can move to where the work is and where a state has agreed to receive them.

This is state’s rights. The real kind, not the kind people invoke when they want to complain about Washington. States making decisions for their own communities based on their own needs. Your governor knows what Wyoming needs better than an ICE agent in Washington does.

And it solves the distribution problem. Not by federal mandate. By economic logic. The roofer goes where the roofs are. The ranch hand goes where the cattle are. The work distributes the people, the way work has since before there were borders.

None of the process to make legal immigrants is easy.

Legalize the roofer and the people who elected a president to deport him will be furious. Deny benefits for ten years and the people who want immediate justice will say it’s cruel. Enforce employer accountability and the donor class will fight it with everything they have. Distribute the burden to all fifty states and governors who’ve never dealt with immigration will scream about federal overreach. Fund the courts and the deficit hawks will ask where the money comes from.

We don’t need comfort.

We need courage.

We’ve been comfortable for forty years and look where it got us. Comfort is the gangrene. Every hard thing we refused to do became the mess we have now.

Let’s take a moment to focus on what’s important.

What do we owe the people who aren’t citizens?

The Constitution answers part of it. The Fifth Amendment says “person.” Not citizen. Person. Due process of law for everyone on our soil. The founders chose that word. Every state in the union ratified it. A word that represents the accumulated wisdom of the men who built this country. You don’t discard it because it’s inconvenient. You honor it precisely because it’s hard.

But the law is the floor, not the ceiling.

What do we owe him as neighbors?

We owe him a decision. That’s what we owe him. After forty years we owe him the dignity of being seen. Of having a name in the system and a place in the country he already lives in. We owe him the thing we’ve owed him since 1986 and refused to give. Not charity. Not a shortcut. Not a free ride.

An answer.

The roofer is on a roof right now. Somewhere in Kansas or somewhere else, it doesn’t matter. The sun is doing what the sun does and the shingles are hot and his knees cost more than they used to but he’s up there. He’s always up there. He was up there before we started arguing about him and he’ll be up there after we stop.

He’s not waiting for us. He stopped waiting a long time ago. He just works.

But we could decide anyway. Not for his sake. For ours. Because a country that won’t decide what it owes its neighbors is a country that’s lost something worse than an argument. It’s lost the thing that made it worth building in the first place.

Some nights the roofer dreams. The same dream. There’s a door and he’s walking toward it and it’s there and then it isn’t. The way dreams work.

Maybe this time the door is real.

I believe in America, and my America has courage.

May God bless the United States of America.

Sources

Act I

* Library of Congress, “1986: Immigration Reform and Control Act” — guides.loc.gov

* NPR, “A Reagan Legacy: Amnesty for Illegal Immigrants” (2010) — npr.org

* Reagan Library, “Statement on Signing the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986” — reaganlibrary.gov

* Immigration History, “Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) (1986)” — immigrationhistory.org

Act II

* Brookings Institution, “Macroeconomic implications of immigration flows in 2025 and 2026: January 2026 update” — brookings.edu (310,000–315,000 removals; 210,000–405,000 voluntary departures; Biden-era 285,000 comparison)

* CBS News, “Have 1.6 million undocumented immigrants left the U.S.?” (Aug 2025) — cbsnews.com (13,000 self-deportations in first six months per internal government figures; 2.2M administration claim)

* Migration Policy Institute, “A New Era of Immigration Enforcement” (Jan 2026) — migrationpolicy.org (1,200+ local law enforcement agreements; estimated ~340,000 ICE deportations FY2025)

* NBC News, “Deportations, ICE street arrests are way up — and so are arrests of immigrants with no criminal convictions” (Jan 2026) — nbcnews.com (sevenfold increase in arrests of people without convictions)

* Cato Institute, “5% of People Detained By ICE Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions” (Nov 2025) — cato.org

* FactCheck.org, “As ICE Arrests Increased, a Higher Portion Had No U.S. Criminal Record” (Jan 2026) — factcheck.org

* American Immigration Council, “Immigration Detention Expansion in Trump’s Second Term” (Jan 2026) — americanimmigrationcouncil.org

* Detention Watch Network, press release (Aug 2025) — detentionwatchnetwork.org

* NPR, “An immigration court few have heard of is quietly shaping policy behind the scenes” (Mar 2026) — npr.org

* NPR, “Judge orders the Trump administration to return a Guatemalan man to the U.S.” (May 2025) — npr.org

* The Intercept, “ICE Said They Were Being Flown to Louisiana. Their Flight Landed in Africa.” (Jul 2025) — theintercept.com

* CNN, “Chatter and rumors about ICE went on for days at school of Texas girl who died by suicide” (Feb 2025) — cnn.com

* CNN, “A Texas man detained by ICE was his disabled son’s sole caregiver” (Jan 2026) — cnn.com

* KFF/New York Times, “2025 Survey of Immigrants” (Nov 2025) — kff.org

* Center for Migration Studies, “The Two Million Deportation Myth Explained” (Jan 2026) — cmsny.org