Why Consider Going To The Usa?

The appeal of the United States is as varied as the country is vast. Millions have traditionally gone there to settle down. Nowadays more and more people visit the USA whether on holiday, to visit family or friends, on business or to study, as the jumbo jets ply backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. For many people a particular visit has been greatly enhanced by combining a business trip with a holiday, a family reunion with travelling around, or using an initial holiday as the way to sample American life before making a commitment to stay longer. The country is so large and varied that a lifetime of visits would hardly exhaust its potentials; the USA is more a continent than the kind of country found in Europe.

British Associations

The British have a long association with the United States. The eastern (Atlantic) coast states were once British colonies, though they broke away from the empire in the late eighteenth century.

English is still the main language, long since adopted as America's own. The initial settlers of the north-eastern States were English Puritans (and the states they founded are still together called New England). English and Welsh Quakers founded Pennsylvania further down the coast. Inland the mountains were first settled by Ulster folk tired of defending Ireland for the Crown. In the south the English landowners and Scots soldiers, pioneers and convicts laid the foundation of a distinctively Anglo-Saxon, almost pro-British society, but one quite unlike that back in Europe, for here a plantation economy was directly based upon the labour of African slaves.

European Immigrants

The Founding Fathers of the American Republic were essentially English gentlemen in rebellion, paradoxically, to protect their English rights against a despotic government far away in Britain. To the west their descendants carved out an empire dedicated to individual freedom, corporate growth and the Protestant work ethic, sweeping aside the native societies (and most other European settlers). When millions of Europeans then arrived at the end of the nineteenth century, not at first speaking English, a nation based firmly upon American experience was already in place, echoing only faintly its British origins. These immigrants created an urban and industrial society almost obliterating the rural British landscape and so recasting the language and the political system that the links with Britain became even more obscured. Even as immigrants learned in school that their new country spoke English and used the common law, their numbers and the needs of their new surroundings brought about a continual reworking of vocabulary and syntax, whilst their strident demands for action and protection recast both the legal and government systems. The British link became ever more submerged: the United States becomes ever more foreign.

A Shared Language

The British and the Irish, alone amongst Europeans, are uniquely able to ignore the foreignness of America if they choose to do so. Though America remains a very distant foreign country whose ethnic variety is today more firmly rooted in Africa or eastern Europe than in Britain or Ireland, the shared language opens up the USA to English-speaking Europeans as for no others from the Old World. Add the considerable number of such people with friends already in America and the British and Irish can retain their links with the USA even while the USA at large looks elsewhere, particularly today across the Pacific.

A Familiar Place

Even as the USA nowadays looks far beyond Britain and Ireland the British and Irish look ever more avidly at the USA. Hollywood movies first brought the rich variety of US life across the Atlantic. Today television continues that tradition. The very quantity of TV movies, documentaries and situation comedies brings both fantasy and daily life into everyone's homes. The USA is a country we visit passively every day, year in, year out. No wonder it often seems more familiar than even unvisited parts of our country, and beckons with the promise of exotic parts where the locals reassuringly speak English.

The educated and skilled middle classes already speaking English can consider settling down in the USA, melting into the background as quickly or as slowly as they want, like East German refugees did in West Germany; no language barriers to put off all but the most stouthearted as happens when the French and German middle classes look across the Atlantic. No wonder it is to the USA that so many British people turn for holidays, business, or to start a new life.