American Dream

I’m going to deal with the American dream. This subject falls into the notion “Myth and heroes” because the American Dream is the idea that any person living in the united states through his work, his courage and his determination can become prosperous. I’m going to answer the following question : Is the American dream a myth or a real phenomenon? First, we will see that the American dream attract a lot of immigrants, after that we’ll see real situation of immigrants at the United States border, and finally we’ll see that there are some difficulties to achieve that American Dream.

So first, many people want to live int the United states and we can take the example of Mexicans. There are several pull and push factors for Mexicans to migrate illegally to the usa, for example to get better job opportunities to have a better economic situation, have a more secure life for the children or to flee poverty. Let’s take the interwiew of Alejandro Perez. In Mexico, he was a mechanic who earned 70$ a moth. When he lewed Mexico to flee poverty and unemployment, he went to the usa and there, he earned 10 times more that in Mexico. Now he wants to bring his family to the Usa and achieve material confort. That’s the Dream of a lot of Mexicans. The American Dream can even go further : Barack Obama has delivered a speech named Stand Stronger, where he shows the avantages of becoming American. For the immigrants living in the USA and who don’t have the American nationality but who could get it, they could even get better job opportunities, rights, and freedom enjoyed by all of Americans.

Secondly, we will talk about the real situation of immigrants at the US border. As we saw, a lot of Mexicans are attracted by the American Dream so they need to illegally cross the border for most of them, but most of the time, they encounter difficulties and tragedies. We can see on several pictures, illegal Mexican immigrants arrested by the border patrol, or who are hiding from the patrol’s helicopters. There are also several stories like the incident of Nelson Omar Lopez born in 1997 who was a worker on a coffee farm, and who died when he wanted to cross the border to join his brothers and sisters. Some people could do everything to migrate to the USA, that shows the American Dream is  a real phenomenon that we can’t ignore.

Finally, this dream is pretty hard to achieve because people need to work hard to get a job and keep it. There is a cartoon called “I’m just doing the job that you won’t do”, who shows pretty  well the situation. We can see 5 frames where several immigrants are doing low paid job in difficult conditions.That shows that the Immigrants are doing the jobs that Americans won’t do, the difficult jobs. However, we can see on the sixth frame, a policeman of Arizona and oncle Sam. That means that the State of Arizona apply laws to stop immigration. There is also a cartoon called Cheap Labor wanted, where we can see the statue of liberty standing on the Mexican-American border wich is made of barbed-wire. The entrance name is written in Spanish, and the Statue of Liberty is hiding her eyes to not see the immigrants entering in the USA illegally. She’s also holding a sign where is written “Cheap labor wanted”. That shows pretty well that USA need immigrants to work hard for them, so that American Dream is a myth, because it can’t be reached by everybody.

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