My parents instilled the idea that working hard was the answer. My dad is a perfectionist, and so am I. After my dad got his professor job and my parents split up, my dad remarried and was able to buy a house when I was about 12 or I think I absorbed messages about how the choices we make financially and for our education and about children For me, stability is having a retirement fund and health insurance, and enough savings that I can replace my laptop or buy a plane ticket without any notice when a relative is sick or dying.
Middle-class life means that I do now go on vacation, but even then, my boyfriend and I would rather go backpacking in the wilderness than visit a resort. All of that social capital that you and your family may have accumulated over the years, and that opened doors for you in your home country, that was your safety net — that no longer exists.
No one in your new country knows what your background is. That carried with it a real weight but was not acknowledged or known in the US. During the Black Lives Matter protests last year was the first time I saw South Asians and Indian immigrants standing up along with their Black friends. His side of the family has been in the country for generations. We joke that she reverse anchor-babied. My mom became a naturalized American citizen when she turned My mom talked about class only to explain why her side of the family had less and why so many of my cousins wore my hand-me-downs.
The story I got was that my mom escaped poverty, and being Mexican, by marrying a white guy. The message I internalized was that the only way to achieve the American dream was to become white. We started out in a tiny New York City apartment that was crawling with cockroaches, so I had the general sense that money was tight. It was never explicitly stated to us as kids, but looking back, it was obvious that my dad as the breadwinner had the goal of advancing his career in order to make the kind of money doctors can make in the US.
I had absolutely no class consciousness until we left New York City for the suburbs. That was my introduction to the hallmarks of American middle-class life: bowling alley birthday parties, sleepover invites, Lunchables and string cheese, minivans, playsets in the backyard, after-school extracurriculars, piles of presents at Christmas, summer camps, annual stays at the lake house or a beachfront property.
Disney was the only thing that cracked through. The long-term indicator of middle-class comfort was getting to eat out at restaurants more regularly. That was absolutely unheard of for our family for many years, but it morphed into a treat and then to a natural cost to account for whenever we were not at home. What used to be a major restriction and stressor is now a relief and a joy.
That took almost two decades of switching visas and seeking employer sponsorship and winding our way through the immigration process that no born American has to think about. You could definitely make the argument that we followed the American dream to a T, just by looking at the ways our spending habits changed over time.
We went from a used car to a nicer car to several cars; from shittier apartments to nicer apartments to a house. There is truth to this, of course, but as an idea, it can end up being as hollow as the American dream.
Perhaps it feels more obvious to me simply because there are members of the immigrant community who are never able to make their professional degrees count in their new homes, or people who predate our arrival in this country whose ceaseless hard work never translated into salaried or white-collar jobs that might let them rest a bit more.
Today, I think the precariousness of the middle class is a pretty universal phenomenon regardless of which path one took to achieve middle-class status. That might just be the effect of trying to be middle class in America — it swallows you whole. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.
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What the American dream looks like for immigrants Upward mobility is common for the millions who come to the US. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. The Goods Is there a Thanksgiving turkey shortage? An investigation. Across the board, more Republicans think each of these factors is more important compared to Democrats. The survey investigated the extent to which immigration attitudes are shaped by neighborhood preferences.
A novel thought experiment asked respondents if they felt a closer attachment to a stranger living in Wyoming or France. But intensity varies. They say this despite being more likely to report experiences of being treated like an outsider. Most Immigrants Come for Economic Opportunity. Others came to attend U. Support for Socialism Slides in Later Generations. YouGov collected responses online March 5 to 15, from a national sample of 2, Americans 18 years of age and older.
Restrictions are put in place to ensure that only the people selected and contacted by YouGov are allowed to participate. The topline questionnaire, full methodology, and report of the survey findings can be found here. Live Now. Cato at Liberty. Blog Home RSS. Immigration reduces the Social Security deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars; the greater the number of immigrants we let in to work and pay into the system, the more likely retirees are to not have to open cans of dog food for their dinner.
Just as America mines bauxite or copper from foreign countries, it has, until Donald Trump, been good at finding the human resources it needs abroad.
Take India, for instance, where I grew up until I moved to the U. Unlike the British, the U. But it benefits, as the British did, from having Indian immigration. We are the third largest immigrant group after Mexicans and Chinese —there are over 4 million of us in the U. Starting in , more Indians than Mexicans have entered the U. But we made up for lost time. In , India sent more immigrants to the U.
Indian Americans are the most successful ethnicity in the U. Up to a fifth of all startups in Silicon Valley were founded by Indians. As a minority, we are the model. Most of the immigrants who come here are substantially better educated and richer than the countrymen they left behind. We do not come empty-handed, mine host! In , two-thirds of the 1. When we needed money, we borrowed from family.
My mother came here in because her sister in Detroit, a U. Because, as I discovered recently, my mother never finished her college degree. In a month, she was to get her bachelor of arts, in philosophy and French, after her final exams. She was confident of the results; she was a good writer, and her essays would be shown around as a model for other students.
She had married my father the previous year and was now five months pregnant with me. The taxi pulled into a petrol pump to get refueled, and her friends insisted that she move to the middle because she was pregnant.
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