I have long maintained that very few people care more about or are better cheerleaders for this nation than legal immigrants. People who thought long and hard about where they wanted to spend their lives and chose to come to the United States and leap through all the bureaucratic hoops needed to become a resident and eventually a citizen of this wonderful land.
I never thought much about expatriates. What does one make of people who decided to leave this nation for another? What were they looking for and what made them think it could only be found elsewhere?
An excellent article today tries to explain the reasoning while simultaneously explaining why, despite its innumerable flaws, this really is the best place on Earth:
. . . my heart rings with pride for “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
We are not free in France. I know the difference. I come from a free country. A rough and ready, clumsy, slapped together, tacky country where people say wow and gosh and shop at Costco. A country so vast I haven?t the faintest idea where I would put myself. A homeland I would have liked to keep at a distance, visit with pleasure, and leave with relief. A native land I walked out on with belated adolescent insouciance. A foreign land where I was born because Europe vomited up my grandparents as it is now coughing up me and mine.
Just amazing. I love the fact that we live in a “rough and ready, clumsy, slapped together, tacky country.” Where else could exist such infinite possibilities?