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A Fine Time to Become an American | 5 Minute Video

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Renowned Oxford-trained historian Niall Ferguson recounts his recent experience of becoming an American citizen. His unique impressions are both moving and surprising — even to him.
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Script:

I picked a fine time to become an American.

It was a grey, overcast morning in Oakland, California. I was one of 1,094 people of every color and creed, from 85 nations, beginning with Afghanistan and ending with Yemen. We had gathered, anxiously clutching the requisite documents, outside the rather antique Paramount cinema.

I wasn’t the only new citizen of European origin, but we were a distinct minority. Rather to my surprise, the Chinese were the most numerous group, accounting for close to a fifth of the new Americans. (How many Americans became Chinese citizens that week?) Next were the Mexicans (more than 150 of them), then the Filipinos, closely followed by the Indians.

Yet it was the sheer range of countries represented that was most marvelous. The young man to my right, immaculately dressed in white, was from Eritrea. He had studied computer science in Wales and had initially come to California to work for NASA.

I approach any encounter with US bureaucracy weighed down by dread. So I wondered, would this be like the Department of Motor Vehicles, famed for its Soviet-style antagonism to the public? Or would it be more like the implacable, pitiless Internal Revenue Service?

In fact, the officials of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services could hardly have been more affable. The master of ceremonies was a genial, balding, bespectacled chap who won his audience over with a virtuoso display of multilingualism, chatting to us in what sounded like pretty fluent Spanish, Chinese, French, Hindi and Tagalog.

Yet this was very far from a multicultural occasion. Quite the reverse. To get us in the mood for our impending Americanization, a choir sang a patriotic medley, including a rather baroque setting of the preamble to the constitution, Yankee Doodle, and Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land.

Well, that did it! The way that song conjures up vast American landscapes (“From the redwood forest / To the Gulf Stream waters”) always gets me by the throat because, glimpsed in films, such vistas were what first drew me to the United States.

Then came the information about our rights and obligations—specifically, our right to vote, our option to obtain a passport and our inextricable link to the Social Security system. (Nothing— rather disappointingly—about the right to bear arms. And not a word about the spiraling federal debt we were all now on the hook for.)

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35 Comments

  4. America as well as the entire Western World was settled by White European people, not by all the other people that are always selected to replace the Legacy Americans or in the case of Europeans Indigenous people. Strange how the creator of this video has a homeland that is an Ethnostate with a wall that rejects the very Multiculturalism he and other Jews continually call for in the West.

  11. I would have thought that it would mention in the context of what i have seen from Prager university on YouTube like how the average citizen now earns more, maybe, works and produces more on average for each hour they have worked, how GDP per capita has gone up, how is it a good thing to be a citizen of a country by definition, what defines citizenship and the rights and responsibility of being a good citizen?

  14. Everybody thinks it's a honor to be an american, except the Democrats that think that America , as they say "is not that great", that's why they want to change drastically this wonderful country. They are so stupid that they don't know what they have…until they lose it to socialism.

  17. I was one of the many who (wanted to become a member of the Land of the Free – political/ideological/philosophical motive: idealism – thus:) knocked on the front door – and was refused (Bureau of Immigration) Portland, OR, 1992). Any illegal immigrant to the US is an affront to us.

  20. I am not an american. But i really respect your country. I think that that the hole world are in debt with the stetes (sorry for my english). We have to be gratefull for stopping the nazis and the comunism cancer. You have the gratest nation of earth. Please take care of what what your ancestors have achieved with blood and effort. Greetings from Argentina, a country that has suffered populism for 6 decades.

  28. 2:45 One of the glaring problems with these civil meetings, are our “rights” to government. These are actually privileges, because rights exist WITHOUT governments. Governments are enacted to protect rights. I had a judge spend 20 mins going over civil liberties, for jury duty, but he explained them as God given “rights.” You have the God-given right to vote and etc, but nothing on life or liberty. For further insult, he directed us to disregard blatant constitutional merits in regard to the case.

    The liberal mindset mistakes government for God.