American Opportunity essays

American Opportunity essays Opportunity is defined in Websters Dictionary as a good position, chance or prospect for achievement, which can be compared to the idea of The American Dream. After all, America is known as the land of opportunity, Most people come to America in search of a better life and achieve it through hard work and dedication to their cause. The poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca So Immigrants Are Taking Jobs from Americans and the interview by Studs Terkel Arnold Schwarzeneggers Dream are united under the subject of immigrants, but separated by how each views opportunity differently, depending on ones ethnicity. First of all, in the poem of Santiago Baca, he implies that immigrants do not have opportunities in this country, that there is no American dream. His narrator observes, I see the poor marching for a little work, I see small white farmers selling out to clan-suited farmers living in New York (Baca 1111). Here, the narrator implies that immigrants come to this country in the hope of finding a better world, but what they find is the sad reality of an immigrant: acquiring poor paying jobs and taking the leftover jobs. In the same way, Bacas poem denotes negativism about opportunities for immigrants in America: I see this, and I hear only a few people got all the money in this world, the rest count their pennies to buy bread and butter (Baca 1111). He indicates that only a few are lucky enough to succeed and make their dreams come true, but the rest have to stay their whole lives struggling to just have a piece of something. Baca also assumes that opportunities for immigrants are rare t o the point of risking their lives to achieve some dreams that are out of reach: Below that cool green sea of money, millions and millions of people fight to live, search for pearls in the darkest depths of their dreams (Baca 1111). The author insists that ...