After a few rounds of back and forth, the Chinese-looking man informed us that we would not be going to America, at least not yet. My mother started crying right on the spot. The middle-aged American woman shifted uncomfortably in her seat.The Consulate wanted additional proof of my mother’s country of birth—she did not have a birth certificate. Children born in the chaos and poverty of the Third World often did not have the luxury of a birth certificate or the record-keeping habits of holding onto their proof of one.

My mother was born in a dusty and impoverished Indonesian town in the first half of the 20th century. She had disclosed her birthplace when my family first applied for immigration to the United States, and the Consulate accepted the relevant paperwork she provided without raising any objections.

But the Chinese-looking man and his colleague wanted the additional documentation now, and they spoke as if what they sought was easy to obtain. They instructed us to get affidavits from friends and neighbors in Indonesia who could attest to my mother’s place of birth. They were not swayed when we informed them that we knew no one in Indonesia anymore.

My mother left Indonesia for China when she was 10 and escaped one poor country for another. She never returned.

Now that our family wanted to leave China for America, America would not let us, unless we delivered the affidavits its consular officers demanded.

Since we believed that immigrating to America was a privilege, not a right, we did what America asked of us and tried to obtain the impossible.

My mother searched her memory for anyone she could have known who still lived in Indonesia. She sent telegrams to individuals whose names she could barely remember and to addresses she knew were likely no longer valid.

Our family bought expensive gifts for acquaintances who might travel to Indonesia, begging them to help us find our old friends and neighbors.

In the end, we found nothing and no one. After each failed attempt—and many times in between, I saw my mother cry quietly in the living room.

Everyone we knew in China wanted to leave for America, and everyone who could leave had already left.

The backwardness of China’s economy and the lingering cruelty of its policies from decades past were all reasons that fueled our desperation. For my parents, perhaps the biggest reason to leave were their two children, one in elementary school and one in junior high, who barely understood the stakes involved.

We pursued our fruitless efforts to extract affidavits from Indonesia for months, and seeing that we were getting nowhere, the American Consulate finally relented. We were informed that if my mother could obtain affidavits from her siblings attesting to her birth in Indonesia, then America would consider that to be sufficient proof.

Yet collecting the relevant affidavits from my mother’s siblings turned out not to be trouble-free. Two of her siblings lived in Hong Kong, so we wrote letters beseeching them for their help. They encountered scheduling problems and one had ailments that kept her from attending to our request. A simple task that could have taken a few weeks dragged on for about nine months.

We waited, wondering if our wait would ever end.

It did end after what appeared to be an eternity. When the affidavits were finally signed and delivered to the Consulate, America in turn granted its formal approval of our immigration application, and we rushed to meet her, excitedly and legally.

This was how my family came to America.

We did not disrespect U.S. borders, even though our dreams for a better life were no less desperate than many of those who are now illegally in this country.

Instead, we waited, filled out every form and followed every rule.

We did not believe that we should show up here illegally, and then once we were here long enough, demand that America grant us legal status or even citizenship—simply because we were already here and too many others have come here illegally just like us.

We could not have known that we would have a U.S. president who likes to dole out government goodies to win an election, even when one of those goodies include is the precious commodity of the right to live and work in the United States.

We could not have expected that the Republican Party would fold like a cheap deck of cards as soon as they saw the cost of not engaging in the same type of racial pandering and political giveaway.

We certainly did not think that we were entitled to the generosity and kindness of the American people, who simply do not have the stomach to break up families and deport millions of people who had violated U.S. laws.

So, we chose the path that we chose.

In the years since our arrival in America, after we became U.S. citizens, we attempted to bring to America my aunt in China whom we loved dearly. By then, the immigration lines for family reunification had grown much longer, and the wait for my aunt—from application to approval—would last over ten years.

We waited again, as America had told us to, but this time, it indeed would not be good enough. With just a few years left in the immigration lines, my aunt, an able-bodied woman in her forties, passed away after a short battle with cancer.

Before she fell ill, she had the resources to travel to America and overstay her visa. She did not—and we would not have let her—because it was against America’s immigration laws.

So we waited for the happy day when she would finally join us here in the United States. That day never came. We ran out of time, and America’s illegal immigration population grew.

We could have made a different set of choices, but having made the choices that we did, we certainly would not accuse those who believe in enforcing the country’s immigration laws of being anti-immigrant or anti-Hispanic. We can only hope that policymakers in Washington would not view protecting U.S. borders as a quaint notion that is no longer worthy of a robust defense.

When solar panel maker Solyndra declared bankruptcy in September 2011, the Obama administration defended its $535 million loan guarantee to the company by touting the need to compete with China. At a congressional hearing, Jonathan Silver, then executive director of the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office, said, “[In 2010, China] alone provided more than $30 billion in credit to the country’s largest solar manufacturers through the government-controlled China Development Bank. That’s roughly 20 times larger than America’s investment in the same time period.”

Since then, China has shown the world that massive government subsidies are no guarantee of business success. Today, the solar industry worldwide is suffering from oversupply, weak demand, and depressed prices, and many of China’s solar manufacturers are fighting huge financial losses, debt, and bankruptcy. Not surprisingly, the Obama administration, which was eager to follow China down the path of spending big on clean energy, has had little to say about the lessons to be learned from the current disarray of China’s heavily subsidized solar industry.

In the past five years or so, China’s solar producers have risen from relative insignificance to world dominance. Their success has been driven by the hard work of Chinese businessmen who chased after capital, entrepreneurs who implemented business plans, and workers who toiled in production plants in polluted cities. Yet the hand of the Chinese government has also been continuously visible.

Bent on promoting China’s leadership in green technology, Beijing has directed a flood of government subsidies, tax breaks, and massive credit lines from state banks into the solar industry, and local governments have offered benefits like cheap land. In the process, China became the largest solar exporter in the world. Its top manufacturers, such as Suntech Power, Trina Solar, Yingli Solar, JA Solar, and LDK Solar, were publicly listed on U.S. stock exchanges. For the year 2012, Solarbuzz, a market research website, estimated that China would account for 76 percent of all solar wafer production in the world.

Yet China has also saturated the solar industry with overcapacity. A recent solar market research report released by GTM Research and the Solar Energy Association reveals that global solar manufacturing capacity stands at 70 gigawatts, even though only an estimated 31 gigawatts are needed. China is responsible for much of the glut, and as another GTM report cited by the New York Times indicates, Chinese companies alone had the ability to manufacture 50 gigawatts of solar panels last year.

Inconveniently for the Obama administration, those market forces that it likes to dismiss affect even companies favored by the state. China’s rush to boost capacity in a hot new industry seemed like a great idea until the market sank. First the 2008 global financial crisis caused a worldwide economic downturn. Then the financial turmoil plaguing Europe since 2010 caused countries like Germany, Italy, and France to reduce government subsidies for solar power significantly. According to the Chinese press, some 70 percent of China’s photovoltaic solar modules are exported to Europe. Thus, Europe’s budget cutbacks have significantly weakened demand for solar imports from China.

In addition, polysilicon, the essential raw material for photovoltaic cell and module products, went from severe shortage to growth in worldwide manufacturing capacity beginning in 2010. As polysilicon became more abundant, the prices of solar products dropped, causing the profit margins of solar companies, including Chinese ones, to plummet.

Meanwhile, it has not helped that the U.S. Commerce Department imposed tariffs on Chinese solar products in 2012, while the same year the European Union proceeded to conduct investigations into anti-dumping practices and unfair government subsidies in the Chinese solar industry.

As a result, Chinese solar companies face a gloomy outlook. The industry may have reaped enormous government financial support that drew open envy from President Obama; but according to the state newspaper China Daily, numerous small and medium-sized solar cell manufacturers have gone bankrupt, and more than 80 percent of China’s 43 polysilicon companies have stopped production, as prices and orders have declined. China’s largest solar manufacturers are battling severe financial problems.

LDK Solar, the largest maker of solar wafers in the world, faces a mountain of debt totaling about $3.6 billion. Xinyu, the company’s hometown in Jiangxi Province, has come to the rescue. Last July, the city government approved a measure to fund approximately $80 million of LDK’s loans. Then in October, LDK raised some $23 million by selling a 19.9 percent stake to Heng Rui Xin Energy, a renewable energy company partly owned by Xinyu.

Suntech, the world’s largest solar panel maker, also needed a bailout from its local government. Burdened with over $2 billion of debt, it received nearly $32 million in emergency funds in September. The loan was or-ganized by the city of Wuxi in Jiangsu Province, where Suntech is headquartered, and was extended by the local branches of state banks, including the Bank of China and the China Development Bank.

Local bailouts provide much-needed cash to large employers, but they do not necessarily please central planners. Beijing, well aware of the overcapacity, has instructed China’s solar industry to consolidate. In late December, Premier Wen Jiabao chaired a meeting of the State Council, China’s cabinet, to reemphasize what everyone knew to be Beijing’s wish: Let the solar industry reduce production and undergo mergers and reorganizations. Local governments, frightened by the prospect of massive layoffs if large solar employers go bankrupt, have ignored Beijing’s call. Whatever the Obama administration may believe about state omnipotence or the Chinese government’s power to push clean energy projects with a snap of the fingers, state planning is hardly so simple or efficient in practice.

For a state-driven economy like China’s to outcompete market liberalism, it would have to routinely pick the right winners and losers, according to Peter Thiel, president of Clarium Capital Management. But Thiel, founder of PayPal, an early investor in Facebook and LinkedIn, and a man who knows something about picking winners and losers, noted in a phone interview nearly three years ago that he is skeptical that central planning can get the job done, especially when it attempts to shape industries not yet proven and innovation not yet seen.

The Obama administration lacked the same foresight, and its hubris and hostility toward free markets have led it to waste taxpayer money on Solyndra and other clean energy projects. Some of the companies that have filed for bankruptcy since Solyndra’s -failure include electric car battery maker A123 Systems, which received $249 million of stimulus money; energy storage systems maker Beacon Power Corp., which received a $43 million loan guarantee from the Energy Department; and solar conversion technology developer Satcon Technology Corporation, recipient of a $3 million grant.

The investment losses incurred by the Obama administration in its green energy portfolio no doubt pale in comparison to the billions spent by the Chinese government to nurture and prop up its renewable energy companies. Nevertheless, the turmoil in the Chinese solar industry teaches that massive state spending cannot forestall changes in market conditions, though it can -distort market incentives and lead to overcapacity, inefficiencies, and other unintended consequences. The logic of the free market applies across national borders and without regard to the wishes of big-government dreamers.