Vanishing Frontiers by Andrew Selee

Author:Andrew Selee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2018-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

8

“If I Were to Go Back, I’d Still Be Homesick”

Migrants Reshape Communities on Both Sides of the Border

When Daniel Lubetzky and his family first relocated from Mexico City to San Antonio, Texas, he was still a teenager and had no way of imagining what his adopted country had in store for him. Born and raised in Mexico’s capital city, Lubetzky showed an early aptitude for business, selling watches in a local market in San Antonio to make money on the side while he finished high school.

After college at San Antonio’s Trinity University and later law school at Stanford, Lubetzky moved to New York City and tried setting up his first business, selling hummus and Middle Eastern sandwich spreads. A few months spent in Israel had inspired him to try to do something that would build peace in the Middle East at the same time that he built a business. The spreads were made jointly by Israelis and Palestinians, with some of the profits funneled back into peace efforts in the region. He called it a “not-just-for-profit” enterprise. It was designed to make money but also to contribute to the social good.

Lubetzky didn’t hit on the business idea that would catapult him to much greater success until a few years later. He decided to make nutrition bars from nuts, fruits, and spices, packaged in transparent plastic wrapping to showcase their natural ingredients. He would reinvest some of the profits in social causes, as he had done with the first business. He called the product “KIND Bars” to capture the socially oriented ethos of the business and its focus on health.

Today, KIND is the fastest-growing nutrition bar—by far—in the United States, competing effectively with similar offerings made by major multinational companies like Kellogg’s and General Foods. Lubetzky still has a noticeable Spanish accent and retains his love of Mexico, but he is happy in New York as a successful and innovative American entrepreneur and the father of four US-born children.

Without question, Lubetzky is an unusual case among Mexican immigrants. He had a middle-class upbringing in Mexico City, thanks to his father’s hard work in starting a profitable business. He also had access to a top-notch education after arriving in the United States, attending leading universities that helped prepare him for his later professional ventures. And Lubetzky also had his father’s extraordinary example as a Holocaust survivor, which he still holds up as the most important influence in his life. His father escaped Dachau concentration camp at the end of World War II before resettling in Mexico as a refugee and marrying Lubetzky’s mother. Lubetzky is both an immigrant in the United States and the son of a refugee in Mexico.

But his path is, in one crucial way, very similar to that pursued by many other Mexicans who have moved north to the United States. Mexican immigrants—and, as it turns out, immigrants generally—have an unusually high rate of entrepreneurship in the United States. Most will never be as successful as Lubetzky, whose business

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