The American Dream: Reality or Fantasy?

For the next week in class, we will be working on our Wikispaces project.  My group's topic is Labor & Immigration, and there are some themes I noticed from the 19th-century that are still applicable today.

19th-century:  Many immigrants came to America, "the land of opportunity and equality", to escape poor working conditions, disease, and overcrowding in Europe.  By the 1850s, over 240,000 new immigrants came to the U.S. annually.  The Irish were a major group of immigrants during the mid-19th century.  The potato famine pushed nearly a million Irish people to America where they were too poor to afford land.  Many immigrants worked at factories in the growing urban areas where they were paid lower wages than native workers.  Native workers resented the wage-depressing influx of immigrants. "No Irish Need Apply" was commonly posted outside factory gates.  These Irish immigrants lived a difficult life in poverty with discrimination against them.   Another large group of immigrants were Germans who suffered from crop failures and the War of 1848 in Europe.  Unlike the Irish, most Germans came to America with some amount wealth.  They were able to afford land in the west and became farmers, rather than urban factory workers.

Today:  Immigrants from around the world still come to the United States, hoping for a better life.  There is still controversy today concerning immigrants increasing the competition for jobs within the U.S.  However, there are laws, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that protect against discrimination in hiring and the workplace.  A new obstacle to the American Dream (that did not exist in the 19th-century) is the expense of college education.  According to Chris Williams from The Guardian, average student loan balance has grown from $10, 649 to $20, 326 in the past nine years.  In addition, the global recession of 2009 increased difficulties for college graduates in finding jobs and supporting themselves.  In fact, more than a third of millennials live with their parents, many because they are unable to afford housing for themselves.

James Truslow Adams defined in his book, The Epic of America, the American dream as "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement."  In the 19th century, the American dream was something achievable for the Germans because they started off with some amount of wealth.  Today, the American dream is achievable for most people who can find stable jobs and have manageable college debts.  No one is guaranteed to reach their goals, and there is inequality in opportunity. Those who start with some amount of wealth have greater advantages.  Higher education, once considered a ladder toward success, is rising in cost and becoming unaffordable for even more families.

Today, the American Dream is a fantasy for most people, but can become a reality with the help of hard work and luck.