Let me tell you a story. A friend of mine is an immigrant from an country on the Indian subcontinent. In 2001, just after 9/11, he and his parents left his country and came to the United States. They arrived with absolutely nothing — the proverbial shirts on their backs story — and found themselves in a tiny, all-white town in upstate New York, living in the basement apartment of a family friend. My friend’s father had been a big deal back in his country of origin, with a good government job; in America, he was nothing. They were homeless and jobless; they had no assets, and couldn’t transfer them from their home country; they had no credit rating; they had no car.

My friend, who was 18 and had just finished high school, resolved to get himself a job. He walked a mile and a half in the winter’s snow to the nearest gas station and asked the owner if he could work there. My friend’s English was good, so he was given a few shifts at minimum wage. (Or less.) Each day, he walked the three mile round trip — through mountains of snow, no less — to work for four or five hours so that he and his family could get themselves back on their feet. After a few weeks, to this job he added a second — also at a gas station, two miles away from the first — and then a third, an overnight shift cleaning a local bank. He found a discarded bicycle and fixed it up, so that he could more easily move around. This, he told me, “changed everything.”

After a while, he heard about a community college, four or five miles from his new home. So he trudged there and asked the admissions officer if he could enroll. His qualifications were from another country, so the man had no idea what they meant. Through sheer force of personality, my friend insisted that he be accepted. He was.

He kept his three jobs, studying while working at the gas stations and living on almost no sleep. After his first year, someone at the community college told him that he should apply for a scholarship transfer to Cornell. He did. He got in, on a full scholarship. His father, meanwhile, got a job at the local bank, and rose to become its manager. His mother works as an administrator in the local school. My friend now has a great job in Manhattan and he just got married to an American girl.

My friend has brown skin, and he speaks with a slight accent. He moved to the United States almost immediately after 9/11, to an all-white and rural town in New York state, four or five hours from Manhattan. He tells me that he has never been on the end of any racial animus. In fact, the opposite is true: When a natural disaster hit his home country, he told me, the local police department came to see him and his parents — the “only brown family in twenty miles” — and asked if they could host a fundraiser for the family he had left behind. “Charles,” he told me, while we were driving up to his hometown, “I love this country. It gave me everything. Nowhere else could this story be possible.” At his wedding, speaker after speaker noticed that he was the “American Dream personified.” He is.

And yet, he’s a Democrat.

This is a real problem for conservatives. We have long ceded the moral advantage to a party whose record boasts 50 years worth of failure on poverty, but to have allowed the Left to claim that it is the party of aspiration really is too much. My father left school at 16. He didn’t come from money, or from an elite family. In fact, he’s one of those people that Joe Biden likes to pretend he is. My father is a conservative because Mrs. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan appealed to him with their message that he could make it if he tried hard and behaved responsibly, and they treated him as if he were a responsible human being rather than a helpless case in need of help.

I understand that immigrants tend to lean Democratic because they are on average poorer. But when you have an immigrant who made it on his own, rose to a position of considerable success, and speaks about America like Ronald Reagan and he’s still a Democrat, you have a deeper problem.