The day my father signed up for unemployment benefits

My father passed away three years ago and rarely does a day pass that I don't think of him. It is unusual, however, for me to be reminded of my father by a scene in a novel. That happened recently, as I was recently reading Khaled Hosseini's beloved modern masterpiece, "The Kite Runner."

Though it first appeared in 2003, the book was reissued for its 20th anniversary in a new edition with an afterword by the author. If you have never read "The Kite Runner," which has sold many millions of copies, you have a great and moving experience to look forward to.

Without trying to summarize the book, I will mention that it is written in the form of a memoir. It tells the story of Amir, who grew up in a well-to-do neighborhood of Kabul before Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviet Union and taken over by the Taliban. At the heart of the novel is Amir's friendship with Hassan — a friendship he betrayed as a child and then, many years later, strove to redeem.

Scarcely less important to the "The Kite Runner," though, is the relationship between Amir and his father, Baba. In Kabul, Baba was a man of considerable importance in the community — a wealthy merchant, influential and highly respected. Though Amir knows that his father loves him, he is also painfully aware of his failure to meet his father's expectations. But the relationship between father and son gradually changes after they flee Afghanistan and settle in Fremont, Calif., a community that is home to other Afghan immigrants. Amir recounts with great sensitivity Baba's struggle to adapt to the change in his circumstances — from the wealthy local dignitary he used to be to the poor and struggling immigrant he has become. Baba finds a grubby job in a gas station, where he pulls "12-hour shifts pumping gas, running the register, changing oil, and washing windshields." It is a sorry comedown for someone who had known a very different life back in Afghanistan. But he accepts his lot with few complaints, willing — like numberless other immigrants in America's history — to work his fingers to the bone in order to ensure a better life for his child.

My father, too, was an immigrant to the United States. He came from Czechoslovakia after World War II, the only member of his family to emerge alive from the Nazi death camps. Unlike Baba, my father had been poor in the old country, so coming to America didn't represent a collapse in his economic and social status. But like the father in "The Kite Runner," mine had an unrelenting work ethic. When I was a child, I saw how he put in long days without complaint at a job I doubt he ever much cared for — he owned a furniture store in downtown Cleveland — in order to support his family.

This particular passage triggered a vivid memory. Amir describes going with his father to the welfare office in San Jose, where they meet with their case worker, Mrs. Dobbins.

Baba dropped the stack of food stamps on her desk. "Thank you but I don't want," Baba said. "I work always. In Afghanistan I work, in America I work. Thank you very much, Mrs. Dobbins, but I don't like it free money."

Mrs. Dobbins blinked. Picked up the food stamps, looked from me to Baba like we were pulling a prank. . . . "Fifteen years I been doin' this job and nobody's ever done this," she said. And that was how Baba ended those humiliating food stamp moments at the cash register and alleviated one of his greatest fears: that an Afghan would see him buying food with charity money. Baba walked out of the welfare office like a man cured of a tumor.

When I was about 12 or 13, my father's furniture store went out of business — there was too much crime and too few customers in the Cleveland neighborhood where he had stuck it out for so long. Later my parents would try again, opening a new store in Willoughby, Ohio, a suburb east of Cleveland. In the meantime, however, my father needed to pay the grocery and utility bills. He took me with him to the local government office, where he filled out the required paperwork and provided the necessary documentation to collect unemployment benefits.

I could see that the process made him miserable. He was used to not only pulling his own weight but to providing jobs for his employees. It tormented him that he could no longer keep the business going. It tormented him even more to take assistance from the government. That this was no handout — as a small-business owner, my father had for years paid the employer's share of payroll taxes as well as unemployment insurance premiums — made no difference. To be on the receiving end, even for only a few weeks or months, went deeply against the grain.

As a child and even a young adult I never really thought about it, but in the lives of the immigrants among whom I grew up, there was a great insistence on dignity and self-respect. There was especially an unwillingness to be seen as a taker, even a taker of benefits to which they were entitled. The sentiment expressed by Baba — "I work always. In Afghanistan I work, in America I work" — was typical of the Eastern European men and women with heavy accents and Old World ways who were so prevalent among the adults I knew in my neighborhood, my synagogue, and my school.

One of the things I have always hated most about anti-immigrant nativism is the complaint that migrants "steal jobs" from US-born natives. Not only is it obviously false as a matter of observable fact — as the number of new arrivals has soared in recent years, the percentage of unemployed Americans has fallen — it is also false as a matter of emotional reality. The vast majority of foreigners who come to the United States have always embodied a willingness to work hard, improve their lot, and make a better life for themselves and their families.

For a number of years, on my daily commute to The Boston Globe, I would stop at a coffee shop next to a Home Depot. On my way in for a cup of caffeine early most mornings, I would see a group of young men standing together in the parking lot, regardless of the weather, conversing in Spanish as they waited hopefully for the contractors who often came by in search of laborers for the day. I'm familiar with the nativists' arguments against such arrangements — that the people who hire those men aren't paying taxes, that the workers are susceptible to exploitation, and so on. But I find so much more compelling the inherent dignity of those men, who chose to work rather than take a handout and who were willing to accept the risk of living in immigration limbo if that was the price of building a little American dream of their own.

My father was fortunate enough to be able to enter America legally. Once here, his top priority was to find work — his first job in America was nailing together window sashes — and he didn't stop working until he was in his 70s. Along the way he sold sewing machines and mattresses, ran a hamburger restaurant, became a furniture retailer, and, eventually, became a partner in a wholesale furniture warehouse. He worked all those years not just because he had a family to support but because life without work would have been inconceivable. "I work always. In Afghanistan I work, in America I work."

For a few weeks or months in the 1970s, when he had no choice, he collected unemployment insurance. Somehow I knew he hated to find himself in that position and clearly that knowledge made an impression. Now, decades later, I think back to that episode, and realize that, like so many of the things my father taught me, he conveyed the message without saying a word.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."