The Golden Door Analysis

Imagine feeling disappointed from what seemed to be an extremely suspenseful story, but turned out to be exactly what was expected, all because it was written in the point of view of the wrong character. Stephen King’s thriller, “The Raft” begins with a group of young college kids returning to their old swimming lake in the fall. They each swim to the raft and the quietest of the group, Randy, quickly realizes the object in the water isn’t as harmless as it looks. When the thought-to-be “oil slick” begins to kill off his friends, Randy’s mind races, trying to find solutions to his predicament. King allows readers to travel through the bizarre, yet frightening encounter through the perspective of an outside narrator who is also able to be inside of Randy’s

The unaccepting nature of US citizens is one flaw in the idea of America’s wide open golden doors. The blame and stereotypes added to an immigrant’s burden prevents them from ever feeling welcome and eliminating the gap between immigrants and Americans born in the US.

The United States of America was a country founded by immigrants on the values of equality and freedom and the idea of a fresh start. Only American Indians are truly native to this country and the rest of us have some history of immigration in our ancestry. So what about today’s immigrants? Most people immigrate to the United States searching for simply searching for a better life. Immigration seems like it should be a simple and organized process, but many people who try to immigrate to the United States find that the process is not so simple. To better understand the immigration process, I have interviewed a friend who immigrated to the United States as a small child and now faces the

During Ernest Hemingway’s time in Paris, 1921-26, he frequented the Musée du Luxembourg where he encountered the work of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906). Hemingway cites the post-impressionistic painter as a major influence multiple times, but does so in a particularly enlightening manner within his posthumously published memoir, A Moveable Feast, from 1964: “I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret” (13). There were many things Hemingway saw when he looked at Cézanne’s artwork in the Musée

Dating from the early 1900’s, till this day, people are still risking their lives to pursue the “American Dream”,in the pursuit of happiness and wealth. There are some obvious differences, but one underlying reason. They all come from a different country. According to Boustan, Platt, About 30 million immigrants arrived in the United States during this time. By 1910, 22 percent of the U.S. labor force was foreign born. It is much harder making it across the border legally. The greatest similarity of the 1900’s immigrants  and today is that they both come for economic improvement.

Immigration to America is often a decision made in order to discover a better life for a family or individual. America’s founding ideals are usually what compel foreigners to move to the US. The stories of America being the “Land of Opportunity” have continued to persuade people to immigrate. Although immigration in the 20th century is much different from recent immigration, the underlying reasons for moving to the US are usually quite similar.

In the 1800s, after the Civil War (1861 to 1865), massive waves of new settlers migrated to the United States. May these were Chinese immigrants who sought to take advantage of the Gold Rush in California. Most of them were men, without family. Between that time, hundreds and hundreds of Chinese immigrants arrived, mostly in San Francisco, where they established a place called “Chinatown.” Establishing the place helped encouraged around four thousand Chinese women per year to immigrate to the United States, to be with their husband or father, helping Chinamen managing household. The gold attracted so many immigrants to California, and the desired for wealth attracted Southerners, who brought with them their racial attitude from the south. Work was well paying; a prejudice against Chinese was born. Hate and violence accompanied the competence against Chinese; and brutality against

Illegal immigration has become more of an important issue in the United States since Donald Trump’s campaign for president in 2016. Immigration can be known as the act of people crossing national borders to live permanently in other countries. It becomes illegal when they cross those borders without the legal right to be in those countries. The U.S. has been an immigrant country since the pilgrims in the 1600s and has ever since, been diverse. Most of the immigrants are Latinos that come from Central America, but they also come from all over the world. The current path to legal citizenship is flawed and needs to be reformed to allow rights to be upheld, equal and fair treatment of all applicants, and to facilitate the process altogether.

In the late 1800 many people, fleeing religious and political intolerance, from all over the world made the life changing decision to pack up absolutely everything they had to immigrate to the United States of America, known as the “land of economic opportunity”. Between the years of 1870 and 1900, there were around 12 million immigrants that arrived in the United States. Most of these immigrants migrated from European countries including Germany, Ireland, and England (Library of Congress). Over 70 percent of these immigrants entered through the area of what became “the golden door” in New York City (Library of Congress). Since these immigrants were so desperate for jobs, it made it easy for many people to take advantage of them. In today’s time it seems to be clear that immigrants have a much better chance for survival and success than they did a century ago.

Our 32nd President Franklin Roosevelt once said the famous words of,” Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” (Roosevelt, Franklin) In the dilemma we face today people love to bring this up as an excuse. In all the years our great country has been established, we have always thrived upon immigrants, because even we are descended from immigrants. However when others come here to our country and are not documented and drastically change our country, then we must fight back against them to reclaim what is ours. We live in a nation where each culture and a single person is just a single important piece to make our country great, but there are recent visitors to

America is labeled as the land of dreams, where every single person is supposed to have an equal shot at becoming something greater than he or she are at that moment. This land is filled with dreamers trying to make a living and to make their “American dream” come true. Most of them are immigrants. What is an immigrant? What makes someone an immigrant? Nowadays, an immigrant is a person who is not a citizen of the country he or she are living in and are on a visa or the lack of one. According to Bureau of Consular Affairs, U.S. Department of State, a visa is “...a travel document issued by the traveler’s country of citizenship.” It is a sticker that is applied on the passport and it gives one port of entry to legally enter the country that he or she has chosen. There are essentially two different kinds of immigrants, legal and illegal. But in this country the amount of attention the illegal immigrants get is outrageously massive to the legal immigrants, who have worked extremely hard to get here and most likely spent fortunes to come to this land. This bitterness comes from the author, a legal immigrant. She has been living in America for around fifteen years now out of her twenty year life and she is faced with an option that appeals to no one. If she does not receive her green card, permanent residency, by the time she turns twenty-one, she will become an illegal immigrant and would have to leave her family and life behind because on paper she is not an “American”. Who is

The United States of America is, “a nation of immigrants” as John F. Kennedy called it. Apart from the Native American ancestry, all others trace their culture back to somewhere else (Soerens, M. 2013). In my opinion, the U.S has increasing rate of immigrants, than any other country. It is also successful in providing facilities like education, employment and various career opportunities for global immigrants even today.

     America is an idea, a set of beliefs about people and their relationships and the kind of society which holds the best hope of satisfying the needs each of us brings as an individual. For countless immigrants, the struggle to arrive in America was rivaled only by the struggle to gain acceptance among the population. Immigrants say they came to America seeking economic opportunity and freedom for themselves and their children, and at the same time they have all, at one time,

Citizens who are born in the United States sometimes take advantage of the system and are still considered “citizens.” This is unfair for the immigrants who work, pay taxes and are trying to become a citizen of the state, but have to go through a long and complex process. However, others say that immigrants come here illegally into the country are breaking the law, but most of these immigrants are desperate to start another life and earn money to send back home. Also immigrants do not understand the slow and long processes to be allowed in another country.

Simply put, America is the land of opportunity. In the past, immigrants have left most of their family, memories, and familiarities with their homeland in search of a better life in America, where jobs were easy to find and the economy was booming. These immigrants formed almost the entire American population, a demographic anomaly in which people from nationalities separated by land and sea; these people come from countries separated by expansive distances can live within the same neighborhood. Both Anna Quindlen with her essay “A Quilt of a Country” and John F. Kennedy with his essay “The Immigrant Contribution” have documented the story of these immigrants and