Millions of immigrants head to the United States each year. And millions more would if they could get a visa. Yet, more and more Americans complain of a sense that the cards are stacked against the middle class - and, more devastatingly, its children.
It's not just sky-high college costs, especially compared to Western European universities, or the substantial difference between the amount of state support in Europe and the United States of everything from healthcare to childcare to education - whether Europe's social generosity is sustainable over the long term or not.
Many Americans - both in the United States and abroad - are concerned that the heart of The American Dream, the belief that, as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice often puts it, in America “it doesn't matter where you come from, but where you're going,†is less and le ss true.
A provocative set of statistics in a column by New York Times opinion contributor Steven Rattner makes the case.
Over the last decade or two, the American middle has been hollowed out, with an affluent, well-educated class growing on one side of the divide and a poor and working-class majority on the other, faced with limited opportunities to change their circumstances.
Not unlike the view that many Americans have of a traditional European lack of social and economic mobility: if your father was a farmer or a factory worker, chances are you will be a farmer or a factory worker.
One of the most eye-popping statistics reported by Mr. Rattner, is that a href=â€opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/america-in-2012-as-told-in-charts/â€> 93 percent of all income growth in the U.S. in 2010 went to the top 1 percent of Americans. And 37 percent went to the top .01 perce nt. He writes:
Also astonishing: just 15,000 households received 37 percent of all of those income gains. In no other period in recent American history have economic gains been concentrated so disproportionately in an elite sliver.
And the partially approved deal meant to avert the so-called fiscal cliff - if approved - would do little to slow America's increasing wealth disparity.
What do you think? What is the future of The American Dream? Whether you are an immigrant, an expat or a global citizen, do you believe in The American Dream? Is there something different about the United States than other societies? Has the once-American dream been exported to developing nations and their growing middle classes?
