America in the World

The BBC's outgoing North America Editor writes a fond farewell to the USA

AmericaInTheWorld.com has featured the writings of the BBC's Justin Webb on a number of occasions.  He also addressed a gathering of journalists, politicians and other opinion formers hosted by AITW.

Mr Webb has now left America and will soon become one of the principal presenters of the BBC's flagship currents affairs programmes; Radio 4's Today programme.

Before he left he wrote a goodbye reflection.  You can read it all here but this was his conclusion:

"I deplore the superstition and the eating competitions and the tatty dreariness of so much of America, and I note that the new president is also unimpressed by the infrastructure and not a fan of fat but, after more than seven years living here, I am increasingly convinced that these elements of the nation are not the flip side of the greatness of America, they are part of that greatness.

There is something about the carelessness of America that gives space for greatness.

Out on route 17 in South Carolina, you can do very well or very badly. You can crash and burn, or you can fill up with cheap petrol and ride off into the sunset. If you do not like yourself in South Carolina, you can hire a self-drive hire truck and take it to Seattle. If you do not like your life and you have drive and luck, you can change it because - being American - you believe you can change it.

Sitting in a dingy apartment in New York watching Perry Mason on the TV, you can decide to make it big in law as eight-year-old Sonia Sotomayor once did.  This summer, now in her fifties, she becomes a Supreme Court justice and the latest American story to send shivers down the spines of dreamers of the American dream.  But if Sonia Sotomayor is to make it big, there must be something creating the drive, and part of that something is the poverty of the alternative, the discomfort of the ordinary lives that most Americans endure and the freedom that Americans have to go to hell if that is the decision they take...

More than 300 million people live here now, settlers from all over the world. From Ho Chi Minh City, from Timbuktu, from Vilnius, from Tehran, from every last corner of the earth, they have made America their home and they are still streaming in.  I feel crazy going back to the old world. My five-year-old daughter Clara, who is the proud owner of an American passport, agrees.  She says she intends to leave home, at around 12-years-old, and return to her native land. I do not blame her.

If you are willing to chance your arm, if you back yourself, if you want to live the life, America is still the place to be. Drive out on Route 17 and take a chance!  So that's it from me, I am checking out. But part of me can never leave…"

The first Vietnamese American is elected to Congress

Joseph Cao's story is a great story of what immigrants can achieve in America. A refugee from Saigon, Republican Cao has become an attorney, lost his home in Hurricane Katrina and has now won one of New Orleans' Congressional seats after the incumbent Democrat had been accused of corruption.

We all made (and make) America

All this week AmericaInTheWorld is spotlighting six key arguments from Justin Webb's 'Have A Nice Day: Behind The Chiches, Giving America Another Chance'.  You can purchase your copy here.

The most potent image of America remains the Statue of Liberty.  America at its best remains the land that welcomes immigrants:

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

America's attitude to immigration is discussed by Justin Webb.  Mr Webb has been working in America for the BBC.  He and his wife are British but his daughter, Clara, by being born in the USA is as American as Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.  Webb:

"To get her British passport, there were hoops to be jumped through, stipulations to be noted, and requirements to be fulfilled.  For the US passport there were none.  She is American because she was born here.  Her parents do not matter, nor does her colour or creed, her ancestry, or the cut of her jib.  She is a natural-born citizen, to use the rubric of the constitution, and provided she lives in the US for a bit and pays her taxes and achieves the age of 35, she can be president.  She is as American as any of her 300 million fellow citizens."

By 2025 15% of US citizens will have been foreign born.  Ronald Reagan would have approved.  This was what he wrote in his Christmas message of 1982:

"I know we're crowded and we have unemployment and we have a real burden with refugees, but I honestly hope and pray we can always find room. We have a unique society, made up of cast-offs of all the world's wars and oppressions, and yet we're strong and free. We have one thing in common—no matter where our forefathers came from, we believe in that freedom. I hope we always have room for one more person, maybe an Afghan or a Pole or someone else looking for a place... where he doesn't have to worry about his family's starving or a knock on the door in the night..."

Justin Webb concludes his book with these words:

"America is imperfect.  It has no divine right to be the world's leading nation.  It has no unique insight into the human condition.  And yet something about it sings.  Something about it works.  And we built it: all of us from every corner of the globe whose histories and cultures impacted on the minds of the people who created America and recreate it daily.  It could do with improvement, but it is ours."

> Read AmericaInTheWorld's briefing on immigration.