 It broke my heart that they didn't have economic opportunity in the countries in which they were born and where their families and their cultures were. My name is Ashley Schiller, and I'm the director of donor relations here at the Mercatus Center. At university, I studied Latin American studies and journalism, which maybe doesn't seem like the kind of study that you would do for somebody who ends up in the Mercatus Center. I think it does very much resonate with the Mercatus mission. While studying this, I spent six months working in Latin America. I also later lived in Spain for a couple of years, but mostly worked with Latin American immigrants who were living in Spain. And through meeting these families and becoming close with them and learning more about why they were in countries different than their nation countries, it was because of economic opportunity and purely that they love their home countries, their families were there, it was their home, and they were purely driven by economic need. And it broke my heart that they didn't have economic opportunity in the countries in which they were born and where their families and their cultures were. And so later, when I ended up interning at the Mercatus Center and understanding kind of a missing piece of this puzzle, I saw these terrible policies in these countries and I didn't know why they would have such bad policy. And then being at Mercatus and seeing the importance of the academy in the ideas that later become policy, it really showed me the importance of universities, of research centers looking at these ideas and particularly ones that are looking for opportunities for people to be free and pursue their dreams and be safe and have rule of law in the countries in which they're born. And so that was a really driving force for me in caring about the Mercatus mission, even if it seems a little different than my background, I think these ideas are important for every country, whether it's here in the United States and we're trying to preserve some of these good ideas in countries that desperately need these ideas.