"Spaces and exchanges" - BAC anglais.

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because for them, America is an open society where everybody is on an equal footing. For them, overnight, they can climb the social ladder and become rich even if at the begining they were poor. For them, United Stated is a country without social barrier.

They think they can start from scratch and afford expensive materials, something that they couldn’t do before. The narrator says that the situation of immigrants is still the same, they take risk to emigrate to the USA because of the power of attraction of the American dream.

We can established a link with the notion, Spaces and Exchange because this document evokes the immigration in the United States. Indeed, the immigration flux is a kind of exchange because this people bring their culture and knowledge in a new country. Moreover, this document brings to us an immigrant’s point of view.

III- The impact of immigration on the american culture

The USA is commonly refereed to as the “melting pot”, which is a metaphor highlighting what a multi-cultural country is. As a matter of fact, American culture is defined as a whole composed of many aspects that come from different communities, thus creating a cultural exchange between these different cultures and resulting in a “melting pot”. Jazz is for instance an example of such a cultural exchange that took place in the US, with the black community bringing African rhythms, mixed with European-specific music. Jazz has thus become part of the American culture. Aside culture, other elements also reveal the multi-cultural aspect of the country, such as language. Not only English is widely spoken: Spanish is commonly used in many parts of America, due to the many Spanish and Mexican immigrants who settled there. From a geographical point of view, we can remark that there are often different neighborhoods with a specific ethnic origin, such as the many Chinatowns all over America. Such neighborhoods highlight the diversity of the cultures that compose the American “melting pot”. So the multi-cultural aspect of the United-Statedefinitely deals with both space and exchanges as it takes place all over the country, and consists in a cultural exchange between people from various origins.

Across the centuries, immigrants from all around the world came to America, seeking a better life, and each one of them bringing their own contribution to what defines America nowadays. So both spaces and exchanges were deeply involved in the constitution of America as we know it today. Even though the USA was for long a country of immigrants, the country’s policy towards immigration evolved over time and became more and more restrictive.

Nowadays, to gain access to citizenship, one must comply to a set of requirements, such as having knowledge of the constitution, being able to speak and understand English correctly.

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