Land Of Opportunity ?

The Gallup Poll recently did a worldwide survey. They found out that millions of people would like to leave their own country and go to another country. The number one country they would like to go to is the United States. In fact, about 150 million people would like to immigrate to this country.

That makes it sound like the United States is still viewed as the land of opportunity, where everyone is treated equally thanks to the rule of law -- a bastion of democracy for people around the world. But that may not be really true anymore. Americans like to think that, but Americans have a very ethnocentric view of the world. The truth is that our willingness to invade other countries without just cause (killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians as "collateral" damage) and our indulgence in hate politics, has soiled our reputation around the world.

That 150 million people mentioned above is only a small portion of the number of people who want to go to another country -- actually about 23%. The total number of people who want to immigrate to another country is over 640 million people. And the huge majority of those people would choose another country over the United States (more than 3 out of 4 would rather go somewhere else).

Now most of those millions of people will never be able to immigrate anywhere. That is not the point. Just the fact that the huge majority would now rather go somewhere else should give us pause. The right-wingers are doing their best to turn America into a hate-filled and violent third-world country with no opportunity for most (and they are succeeding) -- and the rest of the world can see that.