Week 5 - The New American

'Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops' (Crévecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, p40) This quote from letter III What is an American in Crévecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer shows what could be advantages of living in America rather than in Europe, particularly so back then in the 18th century. America is being represented as a land of equal opportunity with no unfair hierarchy that exists in Europe. It is for the notion that it doesn't matter where or into what family you were born, but rather by how hard you work, that is what will give you success. It is this concept that attracted people to immigrate to the United States, as they would not be confined by class or oppressed by dictatorships.

The graph above shows the top ten countries of immigration in America in 2009. (http://www.migrationinformation.org/DataHub/charts/10.2009.shtml) Other than the countries that are geographically close to America, the countries that have a high amount of immigration to America are countries where there are a lot of inequalities such as China. I would also like to point out that after the Vietnam war there was a high trend in Vietnamese immigrants in the United States, partly caused by political oppression. This shows that the notion of America being the land of equal opportunity as suggested by Crevecoeur still exists today as major cause for immigration is to escape from political oppression and inequality.