Immigration: Si!

I just finished Malcolm Gladwell's recent New Yorker article on Cesar Millan, the animal trainer who has the "Dog Whisperer" show on the National Geographic channel. (The article's not online, but you can find it in the May 22 issue or see this New York Times interview for more on him.) The article's well worth reading for many reasons, but the thing that got me - amidst a good old-fashioned rags-to-riches story - is this paragraph (redolent with Gladwell's hyper-commification):

When Cesar was twenty-one, he travelled from his home town to Tijuana, and a "coyote" took him across the border, for a hundred dollars. They waited in a hole, up to their chests in water, and then ran over the mudflats, through a junk yard, and across a freeway. A taxi took him to San Diego. After a month on the streets, grimy and dirty, he walked into a dog-grooming salon and got a job, working with the difficult cases and sleeping in the offices at night. He moved to Los Angeles, and took a day job detailing limousines while he ran his dog-psychology business out a white Chevrolet Astrovan.

Why on earth aren't we paying people like this to come here, whether from Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Poland, India, or Ghana? I mean, good lord: who better to be part of American society than someone who will freaking sleep at the office? We throw a hundred K at a new MBA whose only suffering involved that rilly rilly hard stats class and that one interview with McKinsey, but we want to deport someone like Millan? Give me a break.