J. Richard “Dick” Steffy stood inside the limestone hall of the Crusader castle in Cyprus and looked at the wood fragments arrayed before him. They were old beyond belief. For more than two millennia they had remained on the sea floor, eaten by worms and soaking up seawater until they had the consistency of wet cardboard. There were some 6,000 pieces in all, and Steffy’s job was to put them all back together in their original shape like some massive, ancient jigsaw puzzle. He had volunteered for the job even though he had no qualifications for it. For twenty-five years he’d been an electrician in a small, land-locked town in Pennsylvania. He held no advanced degrees—his understanding of ships was entirely self-taught. Yet he would find himself half a world away from his home town, planning to reassemble a ship that last sailed during the reign of Alexander the Great, and he planned to do it using mathematical formulas and modeling techniques that he’d developed in his basement as a hobby. The first person ever to reconstruct an ancient ship from its sunken fragments, Steffy said ships spoke to him. Steffy joined a team, including friend and fellow scholar George Bass, that laid a foundation for the field of nautical archaeology. Eventually moving to Texas A&M University, his lack of the usual academic credentials caused him to be initially viewed with skepticism by the university’s administration. However, his impressive record of publications and his skilled teaching eventually led to his being named a full professor. During the next thirty years of study, reconstruction, and modeling of submerged wrecks, Steffy would win a prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and would train most of the preeminent scholars in the emerging field of nautical archaeology. Richard Steffy’s son Loren, an accomplished journalist, has mined family memories, archives at Texas A&M University and elsewhere, his father’s papers, and interviews with former colleagues to craft not only a professional biography and adventure story of the highest caliber, but also the first history of a field that continues to harvest important new discoveries from the depths of the world’s oceans.

Upon George Mitchell's death in 2013, The Economist proclaimed, "Few businesspeople have done as much to change the world as George Mitchell," a billionaire Texas oilman who defied the stereotypical swagger so identified with that industry. In George P. Mitchell: Fracking, Sustainability, and an Unorthodox Quest to Save the Planet, award-winning author Loren C. Steffy offers the first definitive biography of Mitchell, placing his life and legacy in a global context, from the significance of his discoveries to the lingering controversies they inspired.  Mitchell will forever be known as "the father of fracking," but he didn't invent the drilling process; he perfected it and made it profitable, one of many varied ventures he pursued for years. Long before his company ever fracked a well, he pioneered sustainable development by creating The Woodlands, near Houston, one of the first and most successful master-planned communities. Its focus on environmental protection and livability redefined the American suburb.  This apparent contradiction between his energy interests and environmental pursuits, which his son Todd dubbed "the Mitchell Paradox," was just one of many that defined Mitchell's life.Anyone who puts fuel in a tank or turns on a light switch has benefited from Mitchell's efforts. This compelling biography reveals Mitchell as a modern renaissance man who sought to make the world a better, more livable place, a man whose unbounded intellectual curiosity led him to support a wide range of interests in business, science, and philanthropy.

As mass deportations and escalating "border security" budgets dominate the headlines, Reconstructing Immigration: How to Rebuild America's Economic Advantage, shows why America cannot remain a global economic leader without a modern, lawful way to attract, legalize, and retain the workers it clearly needs. It connects the dots between immigration reform, productivity, entrepreneurship, and regional development, giving readers a coherent plan for how the United States can turn a chronic political crisis into a durable competitive advantage.

Immigration has been the engine of U.S. economic growth for more than a century. But today's enforcement-first politics are using 1980s tools to manage a 21st-century labor market. Instead of asking how many people to deport or how high to build the wall, we should be asking what happens next, and how do we build an immigration system that actually matches the jobs our economy creates.

Reconstructing Immigration: How to Rebuild America's Economic Advantage, puts into context four decades of congressional inaction and a de facto amnesty system that kept millions working in the shadows. It shows how recent crackdowns have punished workers and honest employers while rewarding those who game the system. Through real-world stories, the book reveals how policy failure has distorted entire industries and undermined fair competition.

Longtime business writer and author Loren C. Steffy provides a pragmatic, research-backed policy blueprint for modernizing the system. It details concrete proposals for filling regional labor gaps, increasing the ranks of essential workers and even encouraging immigrant entrepreneurs, all designed to unleash a new economically based approach to immigration policy that could unlock trillions in potential GDP.

Reconstructing Immigration provides understanding and solutions for our broken immigration system that include stabilizing the existing workforce, modernizing legal channels, and building a compliance system that rewards good-faith employers while targeting fraud. Business leaders, policymakers, lawyers, and informed citizens provide practical, economically grounded solutions for one of the country's most polarizing issues.

J. Richard “Dick” Steffy stood inside the limestone hall of the Crusader castle in Cyprus and looked at the wood fragments arrayed before him. They were old beyond belief. For more than two millennia they had remained on the sea floor, eaten by worms and soaking up seawater until they had the consistency of wet cardboard. There were some 6,000 pieces in all, and Steffy’s job was to put them all back together in their original shape like some massive, ancient jigsaw puzzle. He had volunteered for the job even though he had no qualifications for it. For twenty-five years he’d been an electrician in a small, land-locked town in Pennsylvania. He held no advanced degrees—his understanding of ships was entirely self-taught. Yet he would find himself half a world away from his home town, planning to reassemble a ship that last sailed during the reign of Alexander the Great, and he planned to do it using mathematical formulas and modeling techniques that he’d developed in his basement as a hobby. The first person ever to reconstruct an ancient ship from its sunken fragments, Steffy said ships spoke to him. Steffy joined a team, including friend and fellow scholar George Bass, that laid a foundation for the field of nautical archaeology. Eventually moving to Texas A&M University, his lack of the usual academic credentials caused him to be initially viewed with skepticism by the university’s administration. However, his impressive record of publications and his skilled teaching eventually led to his being named a full professor. During the next thirty years of study, reconstruction, and modeling of submerged wrecks, Steffy would win a prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and would train most of the preeminent scholars in the emerging field of nautical archaeology. Richard Steffy’s son Loren, an accomplished journalist, has mined family memories, archives at Texas A&M University and elsewhere, his father’s papers, and interviews with former colleagues to craft not only a professional biography and adventure story of the highest caliber, but also the first history of a field that continues to harvest important new discoveries from the depths of the world’s oceans.

Upon George Mitchell's death in 2013, The Economist proclaimed, "Few businesspeople have done as much to change the world as George Mitchell," a billionaire Texas oilman who defied the stereotypical swagger so identified with that industry. In George P. Mitchell: Fracking, Sustainability, and an Unorthodox Quest to Save the Planet, award-winning author Loren C. Steffy offers the first definitive biography of Mitchell, placing his life and legacy in a global context, from the significance of his discoveries to the lingering controversies they inspired.  Mitchell will forever be known as "the father of fracking," but he didn't invent the drilling process; he perfected it and made it profitable, one of many varied ventures he pursued for years. Long before his company ever fracked a well, he pioneered sustainable development by creating The Woodlands, near Houston, one of the first and most successful master-planned communities. Its focus on environmental protection and livability redefined the American suburb.  This apparent contradiction between his energy interests and environmental pursuits, which his son Todd dubbed "the Mitchell Paradox," was just one of many that defined Mitchell's life.Anyone who puts fuel in a tank or turns on a light switch has benefited from Mitchell's efforts. This compelling biography reveals Mitchell as a modern renaissance man who sought to make the world a better, more livable place, a man whose unbounded intellectual curiosity led him to support a wide range of interests in business, science, and philanthropy.

As mass deportations and escalating "border security" budgets dominate the headlines, Reconstructing Immigration: How to Rebuild America's Economic Advantage, shows why America cannot remain a global economic leader without a modern, lawful way to attract, legalize, and retain the workers it clearly needs. It connects the dots between immigration reform, productivity, entrepreneurship, and regional development, giving readers a coherent plan for how the United States can turn a chronic political crisis into a durable competitive advantage.

Immigration has been the engine of U.S. economic growth for more than a century. But today's enforcement-first politics are using 1980s tools to manage a 21st-century labor market. Instead of asking how many people to deport or how high to build the wall, we should be asking what happens next, and how do we build an immigration system that actually matches the jobs our economy creates.

Reconstructing Immigration: How to Rebuild America's Economic Advantage, puts into context four decades of congressional inaction and a de facto amnesty system that kept millions working in the shadows. It shows how recent crackdowns have punished workers and honest employers while rewarding those who game the system. Through real-world stories, the book reveals how policy failure has distorted entire industries and undermined fair competition.

Longtime business writer and author Loren C. Steffy provides a pragmatic, research-backed policy blueprint for modernizing the system. It details concrete proposals for filling regional labor gaps, increasing the ranks of essential workers and even encouraging immigrant entrepreneurs, all designed to unleash a new economically based approach to immigration policy that could unlock trillions in potential GDP.

Reconstructing Immigration provides understanding and solutions for our broken immigration system that include stabilizing the existing workforce, modernizing legal channels, and building a compliance system that rewards good-faith employers while targeting fraud. Business leaders, policymakers, lawyers, and informed citizens provide practical, economically grounded solutions for one of the country's most polarizing issues.