The American Dream

The USA has been the dream for many because of its size and its huge technical and natural potentials. It was an escape for many from economic deprivation and political persecution. The first immigrants to it were essentially the Europeans who faced political and religious persecutions, especially the Irish Catholics.

Today, it’s becoming clear that the USA is no longer the sole absolute power as other emerging powers like China and India are rivalling it on the world stage although they haven’t yet succeeded in making it a shrunk power. The USA is still a land of dreams for those facing absolute dictatorship in their home-countries. For them an escape to the USA despite the reduced opportunities is better than eking-out a living under oppression. The national lottery for migration to the USA shows to what extent it remains the hope for many to start a news life. The 12 million illegal immigrants, especially from Mexico and Latin America show that the USA is the only exit for a better life.

The USA, despite its shortcomings, remains a huge machine producing the best. Its cultural influence is apparent throughout the world. Even those who reject it find themselves obliged to imitate its cultural values because they are a shortcut to easy life and success.

As to the quotation, "[America is]...a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement", it remains debatable as there are still other factors like race and creed. Many black people for instance complain that they are underachievers because of prejudices against them despite the existence of black celebrities from politics like Condoleezza Rice to sports like Tiger Woods.

The USA is a country of corporations where competition is fierce driving anyone to do their best but sometimes at the expense of those who with their small means can’t fight. Globalisation is even driving small businesses out of the market while outsourcing is reducing job opportunities for those with little skills.

On a final note people from around the world should succeed in implementing their dreams in their own countries. The USA after all is a land, a parcel from Planet Earth. Other countries have the same, if not more resources than it. But they lack the ability to make the best of what they have. You can have a forest. But what matters is what you make of its trees. Are they destined just for making chars or sticks or are they destined to make the best carpentry and to substitute the lost ones. People all over the world should make the best of their potentials and not to keep looking to the USA as the sole land of opportunities as they can’t make it on their own lands.

The USA is destined for a demographic change in the future when there will be no racially dominant group. It is estimated that in less than ten years, there will be no racial majority in California and the same will all over the USA in 2050. It will be interesting to see the kind of dreams this new racial mix and proportion will produce and how the USA will fair on world stage as many accuse the White American to be behind the drive for total supremacy through all means, including military interventions and regime changes.

Here is a comment by VictorK published on BBC WHYS reflecting the fear of the USA losing its White Anglo-Saxon majority. I wonder how credible his views below are.

Abdelilah Boukili's post raised a point that I'd really like to see WHYS address: the demographic transformation of the USA.

On present trends, unless the Government and people of the US change their current immigration policy, America will, by 2050, lose -forever - its historic European majority. Hispanics, African-Americans and Asians will outnumber Euro-Americans.

But what's rarely debated is whether 'America' will still exist if this happens. Analysts like Samuel Huntington argue that America is 'America' because it possesses an historic Anglo-Protestant cultural core, and whatever undermines or destroys that core must of necessity also undermine and destroy America as an historic nation with a set of values and traditions derived from its Anglo-Protestant core (liberty, constitutional government, the rule of law, dynamic capitalism, freedom of religion, the pursuit of happiness, etc). Others - neocons especially - argue that America is a 'notion', an idea, the world's first 'proposition nation', and that the massive stream of legal and illegal immigrants that it receives need not threaten American identity or values, so long as the immigrants are all assimilated into American culture via the celebrated 'melting pot.'

I think that the neocons show - as usual, a la Iraq and Afghanistan - undue optimism based on good intentions and a theory based on nothing in particular, certainly not reality. The argument by the likes of Huntington - which I for one find persuasive - is drawn from history and represents what is known from the experience of nations.

On current trends the year 2050 will mark the disintegration and collapse of the United States. It will be balkanised along racial and ethnic lines and will become a kind of superior Brazil, though probably not so harmonious re its constituent tribes. It will cease to be a superpower as it devotes more and more of its resources and energies to trying to manage the racial and ethnic conflicts that will increasingly characterise its public life, conflicts that will no longer benefit from the existence of a dominant (and benign) Euro-American majority to impose humane solutions. China will displace the US as a global power. The possibility of secession in the South west of the country will become a reality (with Hispanic majorities dominating from Texas to California), or the rest of the country will expel this region from the US, the south west having by now become an extension of the corrupt and incompetent states of Latin America. The American presence in the world, which on the whole has been a force for good, will have permanently ended.

That's the nightmare scenario, but not an impossible one on present trends. I'd be sorry to see it, or anything like it, come to pass, since a world dominated by China will be an even greater nightmare.

It's up to Americans to prevent this future realising itself by taking their presently lax and irresponsible immigration policy in hand, for the good not just of their country, but of the world.

Demography is destiny, and America's current demographic future is a bleak one (as are France's and Holland's, which face the even more terrible prospect of becoming part of North Africa).