In the past two-plus years, it’s been my privilege to make multiple visits to over a dozen countries (predominantly in Africa). Most often in these places, I’m spending much of the time with some of the poorest of the poor and those who work in ministries and organizations providing support, relief, and care. But in this travel, I also end up in conversations with nurses and doctors and pastors and drivers and waiters and hotel clerks … and on and on.
I’ve learned a lot through these interactions and have been surprised many times. But on this Election Day, 2024,I find myself remembering one particular surprise over and over: with startling frequency, many of these people dream of coming to America.
Being well-acquainted with our problems and joining the vast majority of Americans disappointed in much of what’s going on in our common life, it was hard not to treat the first time I heard this dream — from a driver in Nairobi — as something incubated in an almost childish ignorance. Doesn’t he know the myth is markedly better than the reality?
But I asked more about why. And I started paying attention more when others said the same thing — a nurse in Lilongwe, Malawi; a barista in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia; a physiotherapist outside Freetown, Sierra Leone; a police officer in Kolkata, India. All these people — and others — voluntarily would mention at some point how much they and their family wish they could move to America.
To be clear: this phenomenon is not universal — far from it. I have not statistically valid samples to back up these observations. But I hear this dream over and over.
Why? Haven’t these people heard it’s not all apple pie and baseball? (They know.) Don’t they understand Americans are broadly anti-immigration at the moment? (They do.) Do they know there’s an arguably better social safety net in other developed countries? (They don’t care.)
And for that matter, why not dream of Europe — or Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, or Japan? Because those places are not America.
So again, why? I’ve come to think it’s not ignorance or sloppiness that the destination is almost always referred to as “America” rather than some other, perhaps more proper, name. America represents an idea rather than a place. To confirm this supposition: when I ask where in America, the most common response I hear is some spot where someone lives whom the speaker knows.
As the conversations continued, I began to get a better illustration to why this dream exists. The people who long for coming to America aren’t primarily imagining wealth or even more basic needs like safety and clean water. They are fundamentally imagining opportunity.
They like America’s youth as a country. They love its entrepreneurial spirit. They have a vision of a complicated and divided America that, despite all that challenge, is a place where new ideas and hard work can conspire with luck to yield a better future for them and their children. They want to come to America because they know people build here, and they think they can build something here that would be more difficult to build anywhere else.
I don’t know what all this feedback means; I’m reluctant to evaluate any of it. (And I’m not weighing in on immigration policy with this anecdotal data.) But these conversations have made me more grateful for America than I was before.
These conversations have even made me cringe a little less at the Book of Common Prayer (1979)’s Independence Day collect. Previously, I have always taken the rubrical allowance for use of the Collect for the Nation rather than say this presumptuous opening clause:
Lord God Almighty, in whose Name the founders of this country won liberty for themselves and for us, and lit the torch of freedom for nations then unborn …
I still cringe for lots of reasons — such as a curiosity what slaves or women or the authors of the Magna Carta and others of history might think about 18th-century, white, male, landholding Americans “lighting the torch of freedom” — but, imperfections noted, there is more to that claim than I might have thought. We’ll see what collect I use next July. But as for this moment: Today has me thinking about these conversations anew. We are an incredibly divided nation experiencing what is expected to be the closest election in decades.
And yet the idea these folks talk about is still in front of us, and for that reality (among many others) I am grateful. Whatever happens today, my birth has made me a citizen of this place at this time, and problems notwithstanding, that reality is more gift than curse.
