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on 17-Jul-02 08:34 AM
What's so great about America
Columnist Dinesh D'Souza says America gives the ordinary guy a better life than he gets in any other country.
By Dinesh D'Souza
April 15, 2002
Conventional wisdom holds that immigrants come to the United States to get rich. This notion is liberally described in the rags-to- riches literature on immigrants, and it is reinforced by America's critics, who like to think that America buys the affection of immigrants by promising to make them wealthy. But this Horatio Alger narrative misses the real attraction of America to immigrants and to people around the world.
Certainly, America offers a degree of mobility and opportunity available nowhere else, not even in Europe. Only in America could Pierre Omidyar, whose ancestry is Iranian and who grew up in France, have started a company like eBay. Only in America could Vinod Khosla, the son of an Indian army officer, become a shaper of the technology industry and a billionaire to boot.
Besides offering unprecedented social mobility and opportunity, America gives the ordinary guy a better life than he gets in any other country. America is a place where "poor" people have TV sets and microwave ovens, where construction workers cheerfully spend $4 on a nonfat latte, where maids drive nice cars, and where plumbers vacation with their families on St. Kitts. I recently asked an acquaintance in Bombay why he has been trying so hard to emigrate to America. He replied, "I really want to move to a country where the poor people are fat."
The typical immigrant, who is used to the dilapidated infrastructure, mind-numbing inefficiency, and multilayered corruption of developing countries, arrives in America and discovers, to his wonder and delight, that everything works: the roads are clean and paper-smooth, the highway signs are clear and accurate, the public toilets function properly, when you pick up the telephone you get a dial tone, and you can even buy things from the store and then take them back. The American supermarket is a wonder to behold: endless aisles of every imaginable product, 50 different types of cereal, innumerable flavors of ice cream. The country is full of countless unappreciated inventions: quilted toilet paper, fabric softener, cordless phones, disposable diapers, roll-on luggage.
So, yes, in material terms America offers the newcomer a better life. But the material allure of America does not capture the deepest source of its appeal. Consider how my own life would have been different had I never come to America. I was raised in a middle-class family in Bombay. I didn't have luxuries, but I didn't lack necessities. Materially my life is better in the United States, but the real difference lies elsewhere.
Had I stayed in India, I would probably have lived my entire existence within five miles of where I was born. I would have married a woman of my identical religious and socioeconomic background. I would have faced relentless pressure to become an engineer or a doctor. My socialization would have been entirely within my own ethnic community. I would have had a whole set of opinions that could have been predicted in advance.
Because I came to America, though, I have seen my life break free of these traditional confines. In college, I became interested in literature and politics and resolved to make a career as a writer--which is something you can do in America, and cannot easily do in India. I married a woman of Scotch-Irish, English, German, and American-Indian ancestry. Eventually I found myself working at the White House, even though I was not an American citizen. I cannot imagine another country allowing a noncitizen to work in the inner citadel of its government.
In most of the world, even today, your identity and your fate are largely handed to you. In America, by contrast, you get to write the script of your own life. What to be, where to live, who to love, who to marry, what to believe, what religion to practice--these are all decisions that, in America, we make for ourselves. In this country, we are the architects of our own destiny.
"Self determination" is the incredibly powerful idea that is behind the worldwide appeal of the United States. Technology entrepreneurs who come to America from all over the world know this perhaps better than anyone else. In America they are free to make not only new products, but also new personal identities. Here they can break free of the constraints of the old world, so that the future becomes a landscape of their own choosing.
Dinesh D'Souza's new book, What's So Great About America, will be published in April. He is the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
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