Immigrants from all around the world have been coming to America ever since the continent was discovered. The reasons that made people travel across the ocean were different, but all of them pursued the same desire for better life and happiness. Someone escaped the oppression in their motherland, someone ran from poverty and starvation, someone arrived as a refugee of war.
Between the middle of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century the country has received over twenty five million immigrants. Flows of people from Britain, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Russia, Poland, Italy and Greece moved to the United States.
Besides, the natives from Middle Eastern, African and Asian countries also came to live there. Finally, great numbers of immigrants from South America moved to the U. S. Today, the United States of America is one of the most multinational countries of the world.
After millions of people of various backgrounds, religions and ethnicities have arrived and stayed in the U. S. multiple cultural clashes became inevitable. Some of the cultures and nations assimilated and adjusted, some mixed together with others.
As a result, the appearance of a typical citizen of the United States is impossible to describe. Walking the streets of an American metropolis such as New York or Boston one will meet people of all kinds and backgrounds that were born and raised in the States.
This country is often compared to a mixed salad or a stew, where the most diverse ingredients are cooked in one pot, creating a unique and original composition of flavors, making a dish that is unlike others. I certainly agree that the population of the United States has always been very multicultural, this country’s history and prosperity is based on the constant flows of immigration.
For example, industrialization in the U. S. was mainly pushed forward by millions of foreign arrivers that came to the American urban areas to work. Moving away from the food similes, I think that this country and its national diversity could be compared to a puzzle with a great number of pieces. All of the parts of this puzzle are different; sometimes it is hard to put them together because they do not seem to fit each other.
Their colors and shapes vary, yet all of them belong together. Spending some effort, one will find a way to locate a couple of matching pieces and then attach more parts to the initial bit. More and more pieces put together allow the viewer see the bigger picture of the puzzle.
It turns out that all of the parts that seemed so different are able to create quite a homogenous composition, and this is the strength of the final picture, its special feature. Even though the pieces seem so different, they are all interconnected, and each of them is a part of one enormous masterpiece.
Of course, racial stereotypes and inequalities have created a lot of discomfort for the people of the U. S., but a lot of measures are taken by the country’s leaders to overcome discrimination based on ethnic background, and reduce the cultural clashes to the minimum.
Most of the countries on our planet are shared by more than one nation; this is why the news programs are always filled with reports of cultural clashes between two neighboring ethnicities, just like the one happening at the moment between people of Russian and Ukrainian backgrounds on the territory of Ukraine.
The special trait of the United States is that it managed to accumulate dozens of ethnicities, made them neighbors and empowered them to live in peace and work together for the prosperity of the whole nation.