That’s the question I’d like to consider for a while. Of course the question itself may be suspect to some people. In asking this particular question I’m assuming that America is great, and I’m well aware that there are some people in America today that just don’t accept that premise. To those people, I’d like to offer up a suggestion – do like so many other people do and vote with your feet.

I’m not saying “America, love it or leave it.” here, and I’m not simply hoping to get rid of dissenters. Instead, I’m saying that one of the measures of a country’s greatness might be found in the flow of emigrants and immigrants. If more people are emigrating from a country than are immigrating into it, that says something about conditions in that country don’t you think? And if the opposite is true, doesn’t that say something about it as well?

So, let’s consider the “problem” of immigration as evidence that something about America must be great. I use the scare quotes because I don’t really see immigration itself as a problem, and I don’t believe that most conservatives do either. What I do see as a problem is illegal immigration, and that’s distinct from immigration as a whole. If we look at this problem, we can see that both sides of the political spectrum view America as a desirable place to be. One side wants more controls on immigration so that we can keep “undesirable” people out of the country – leaving the definition of “undesirable” open to interpretation depending on which side of the aisle you want representing you. The other side wants fewer or no controls on immigration – whether it’s to create a larger constituency or out of a desire to be more “humane.” Neither side of this debate believes that people are rushing to leave the country – rather they both seem to believe that people are struggling to get in.

So, if people are struggling to enter our country, why are they doing it? What is it that attracts people to America? What makes America great? I have my own answers to that question, but rather than engage in speculation alone I suppose that the ideal way to answer this would be to poll everyone that comes in, and analyze their answers. I don’t have the resources to do that unfortunately, and I don’t really think that anyone does. How do you poll illegal immigrants for example – people that are trying to avoid questioning about how they arrived? Without the resources to conduct such a poll myself, I turned to that fabulous invention of the late twentieth century, the Internet search engine.

In the first thirty results of a query using the keywords “poll of immigrants to United States” (“of” and “to” are treated as noise words by the search engines sadly), thirty of the results had to do with polls about how Americans or people from other countries feel about immigration. Not one had anything to do with how immigrants feel about it. So I tried again. A search with the query “why do people immigrate to the United States” turned up better results, although several of the first available answers are again nothing more than speculation. This paper might shed some light on the subject though. One of the first things that can be found in the abstract are these statements…

A popular cause of immigration among people coming from poor and undeveloped countries is the condition of the immigrant’s homeland… The people that immigrate basically just want to live a better life… Immigrants see the United States as a land of opportunity and prosperity and they want to be a part of that.

Another statement from the abstract also touches on the greatness of the United States…

The United States itself is one of the major reasons that so many immigrants come here;…

Now this particular paper is only available to paid subscribers to the OP Papers web site, and I’m not one of them so I can’t vouch for the research that went into the paper. Still, these initial conclusions match pretty well with my own expectations. That doesn’t, of course, make them correct but as it’s quite literally the first result that I encountered (other than from other bloggers) during my search leads me to believe that there’s some validity to it. That many other articles reflect the same conclusions does as well.

From this, I draw up a simple, short list of things that appear to make America great…

1. Conditions here are better than in other nations.
2. America is a land of opportunity.
3. America is a land of prosperity.
4. The American way of life is better in a subjective fashion than other ways of life.
5. America is unique, offering more freedom, and happiness than other nations.

That first one seems to me to be fairly interesting. Our founders recognized that people will put up with a great deal of hardship before they’ll change the circumstances under which they live. In the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson wrote…

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

We’ve got still more evidence from the things people have had to say about our political processes. The more active conservatives among you will surely remember the many celebrities that promised to leave the country, to emigrate if you will, if George W. Bush won a second term of office. That not one of them actually fulfilled this promise when George W. Bush was reelected in 2004 supports the notion that “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves.” Conditions here must indeed be much better than in some other nations if people are willing to abandon at some considerable expense their established way of life to come here.

America offers its residents economic freedom that may not be attainable in some other nations. Yes, we have our poor, but even our poor are better off than those of other nations. Here, there is no guarantee that a person will find work, but the opportunity is there, and it’s one of the reasons people cite for coming here. In fact, our friends on the other side of the political aisle were fond of reminding us as recently as two summers ago that we have a glut of jobs that Americans just aren’t willing to do. If a person truly wants to find work and money, it’s possible here, even in times of relative economic depression.

It’s not just economic freedom that makes America great either. There’s also political freedom. We don’t generally criminalize dissent here as they do in some countries. Our country never had a Joseph Stalin that would erase all record of his political enemies from the public memory, even going so far as to remove former friends like Nikolai Yezhov from published photographs in the days before tools like PhotoShop even existed…

The American way of life is superior to other ways of life because we have these economic and political freedoms. The founders recognized that the rights of individuals were superior to the rights of society. This is one of the things that made the American revolution distinct from the French revolution. Rather than “Liberty and Equality” which were the central tenets of the French revolution, it was “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that were central to the American revolution.

It was the notion that “All men are created equal” rather than “All men must have equal outcomes” that carried our revolution forward. The first notion, that all men are created equal, leaves the responsibility for the outcome on the shoulders of the individual – and makes it desirable to preserve individual rights and to allow the people to pursue happiness. The second notion, that equality means equality of circumstance and outcome, denies individual rights and restricts the peoples ability to pursue happiness for themselves. Ultimately, the French revolution was a failure. It resulted in a bloodbath that captured the innocent and the guilty alike, and ended not in liberty for the French people, but in a totalitarian dictatorship. The American revolution on the other hand has survived for over 233 years, not a long period of time in the history of the world perhaps, but longer than any other form of “democracy” (It’s really a Republic, not a Democracy.) the world has seen.

This is the principal thing that makes America great in my mind. Our founders believed that all men were created equal, and that their individual unalienable rights were granted to them by God and not by the government. Thus the role of government is to protect individual rights, not to define them. And America’s government – though fallen far from the ideal envisioned by its founders – does this far better than any other government in the history of mankind.

America IS great – and cultural relativism be damned. There is objective evidence to that fact. As such we, as Americans, have a right to be proud of our country. We don’t need our President to go on “apologia” tours or to apologize for leading the world to liberty. We’ve got it right. Those immigrants flocking to our shores can’t all be wrong – Can they?

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