​I Found The American Dream At The JFK International Airport

This past weekend, I hopped off the plane at JFK, in true Miley Cyrus style (Except for I was in New York City rather than LAX). Welcome to the land of concrete jungle where dreams are made of. According to Jay-Z and Alicia Keys, there’s (supposedly) nothing you can’t do, because now you are in New York.

Sometimes, abstractions like dreams, opportunity, and equality can get the better of us. According to the plethora of songs and books are written celebrating New York City’s opportunity, shouldn’t every person who arrives confidently believe that this country is a beacon of hope and a chance to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. However, I am disillusioned and recognize that simply immigrating to America doesn’t necessarily promise socio-economic mobility like it did for the colonists.

Let’s compare two stories: my mom’s first time at the JFK international airport and my first time at JFK. Freshly married at 25, my mom flew into JFK from India. She arrived in this country equipped with an Indian accent, four-hundred dollars and simply dressed in jeans and a blouse. On the other hand, I arrived in JFK en route to visit a trading company on Wall Street, dressed in a blazer from Ann Taylor, carrying a new Coach purse, and smiling a fully contoured face of Bare Minerals makeup. I had received the number and name of the black car driver from an automatic text and knew my estimated time of arrival at my hotel. My diamond preferred credit card was in my wallet along with cash, android pay, and Venmo as multiple backups. Just in one generation, the difference in our stories was already obvious.

However, one thing remained the same: our drive. To both of us, New York promised opportunity that we so desperately yearned for. To Horatio Alger and European colonists, the American Dream meant something very straightforward and quantifiable: socio-economic mobility. His rags to riches story was enticing, but it does not always hold true today.

To immigrants today, however, the American Dream is more than amassing wealth or receiving and education. Rather, I believe that the American Dream has evolved into the option to choose your own destiny. In the United States, my mom could choose when to have kids, whether or not to continue the long and arduous path of becoming a doctor, and how much to donate to charity. I’m definitely not saying that she didn’t have these choices in India, but here she had more independence and free will.

So whether you are an immigrant, the child of an immigrant, or a friend of an immigrant, I hope you recognize the hope for a better future that immigrants have in finding and actively making a better life for themselves, before voting to build a wall to keep them out.