I’m flying back from Las Vegas as I type this post, just finishing a great conference with the Association of Private Enterprise Education, along with one of our senior students. When we flew into Vegas on Sunday, we had a muscle-bound Bulgarian cabbie, and on the way home today, we had a young man named Fabian from Spain. Fabian was very social, and we had a great conversation during the 15 minute ride to the airport. Fabian shared he lived just south of Valencia, where I had recently traveled to visit my daughter, who is studying abroad there this semester. Since I had this discussion in front of my student, it was an opportunity to verify what I often talk about with students in class: the impact of high regulation and taxes on opportunity.

Fabian said he had been in the U.S. for four years, and loved America. I asked him about his perception of opportunity for young people in the Mediterranean states, and that started him on a roll–it didn’t take much to get him going. I’ll put it in quotes, but this is a paraphrase from my memory of the conversation. Say’s Fabian, “There is no opportunity. The government is taking from everybody; the sales tax is 20%, which is after the income tax of 60%. You have nothing left after you work. You can’t live off that. All the politicians are bad; if someone says they are a politician, they are a bad person. They are all trying to steal from the people. My dad, in order to keep his job, he has been forced to take 1100 Euros/month after taxes. You can’t live off that. Spain is a great place to live if you want to just enjoy the weather and you don’t want to have much. But if you want to work, it is communist. “

Fabian related how he enjoyed the U.S., admitting that everybody in Europe loves Mr. Obama, because his policies and attitudes were so like the Europeans. He was more optimistic than I; “you can’t have socialism in America—it won’t work for a big country like the U.S. Maybe a small country can limp along, but a big country can’t have it.”

So what did I learn? First, that my two immigrants both came to the U.S. as an opportunity to escape socialist policies and to work and create a better life. They were both excited to be part of America, and were embracing the hard work, hustling effort of previous immigrant generations. Both had family here, and leveraged those extended social structures to make a successful transition to America. While both had accents, they were very comfortable about adopting the native language to serve in their new country. This seems to be the heart of what America has always been.

Second, it anecdotally confirmed what the data is telling us: Europe’s sclerotic welfare state has stolen much of the opportunity for upward mobility for the young. The very policies many of our young people are embracing with their endorsement of Mr. Sanders (and to a lesser extent Mrs. Clinton) are the very policies that entrepreneurial youth in Europe are trying to escape from.   Be careful what you wish for.

Finally, I was encouraged by their positive attitude. In their minds, America is still the land of opportunity. And they were seizing what they could by joining in our system, learning our language, culture and customs, and serving customers in the market process.