By Loukas Mexis
Yes, I was one of those silly kids that grew up watching Hollywood blockbusters and reading American comics. In a way, part of me always dreamt of one day going to the United States. I went to an American school and pretty much realised my dream had become a reality. But what makes an American dream a dream?
Surely, as victims of Globalisation and the expansion of western culture towards the east, we kept having images of a better future in America. We watched that happen in movies, listened to it through songs and read about it in books. Globalisation mainly depends on culture, since cultural products are the only ones that a country becomes dependent on, once it gets introduced to them. In this case, television, radio and other media outlets becomes a protectorate of western civilization and above all, American.
But today things are different from the movies and books of old. Today the US is recovering from a recession which devastated the country because of the mortgage bubble which burst a few years back. The United States are not what they used to be, and unemployment is on the rise in most of the states, especially the ones us kids dreamt of moving to, like California and New York. The mainland is a safer choice for work perspectives, but still, America is a hard place to be, much like Europe and the rest of the ex-colonised world.
Still, people dream of moving there. In fact, a recent study from Gallup showed that the US of A is still the number one migrating country and more than 138 million people would like to move to from all over the world. It seems the American dream is still alive, but the countries that follow this dream have changed. The Washington Post compiled a map of the countries with the largest percentage of populous that want to move to America, and findings show that Europe is not anymore on board that dream. The UK still holds a high percentage, with 6% of population wanting to move to the US, as well as Israel. But the highest countries are Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Dominican Republic. It is actually interesting to point out that a number greater than 3 out of ten in Liberia want to move to the United States.
Perception is another issue that comes to mind. Because, although China and India have smaller than 5% of the population wanting to move to America, that is still a great number since one percent of these countries numbers more than twenty five million people.
So European countries might have stoped dreaming of America, as most Southern American did, and China and India remain in their country’s boarders, where their economy is still holding strong. But I guess the dream remains: people still think that they will have a better future and life there.
