Why have so many immigrants sought out new lives in America? | Fareed Zakaria

0:05When I was growing up in India, this is hard for people to remember now. But to begin with, it was one of the poorest countries in the world. Poor capital income in India in the 1970s, when I was sort of conscious of this kind of thing and making decisions, I was probably around $200. To give you some context, it is now about $3,000 on its way to $5,000.

0:27It's a very different country from what it was. Secondly, in the middle of the '70s, there was actually a spirit of suspension of Indian democracy. There was a kind of martial law that was called Emergency Rule. Things were very bad, politically, economically. It was also an economy that was fundamentally cartelized, by which, I mean, it was a bunch of rich families that had controlled what was allowed in the private sector because it was a lot of state involvement.

0:56You didn't feel, as a young person, that the canvas was very open and hospitable, unless you came from a family that was already set up in rich. While my parents were upper middle-class professionals, my dad was a politician, my mom was a journalist, they were salaried folk.

1:14It never felt to me like I was going to be able to fulfill my potential in India. But I have to say, I wasn't desperate to get out or anything like that. What happened was I got a scholarship to Yale. I just fell in love with the United States, with the openness, the scale of the canvas that you could operate on, the ability to move up the social mobility. In a sense, I'm telling you all of this because it probably does relate in some ways to some fundamental differences between the two countries.

1:47America is a much more open society. It's much easier to move up sideways, in all ways, it's much easier to express yourself as an individual to be yourself in America than anywhere else. Now, some of that is not about the constitution and the political structure, some of that is that America is a new society, as a famous book called Notes on American Farmer by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, who talks about the new person that America is creating.

2:18Not a Frenchman, not an Italian, not an Englishman, but this entirely new person who has no past. When people talk about the glories of community, I sometimes feel like I came from a country which had a lot of community. When I hear that word, I sometimes want to reach for an oxygen mask, because community can be stifling, it can be throttling. People will often say to me, Indians have such great marriages.

2:43They have rage marriages, and the divorce rate is so low. I'm like, yeah, it's because most of the women in them are miserable, but they're trapped, they can't get out. That gets at the social millier that America creates, which is much more open, and particularly open to outsiders, to people without firm connections.

3:03When I came here, I was on a scholarship, with no money, no contacts. I literally knew nobody other than my brother, who was also a student on a scholarship. Now, how much of that is the constitution? As Madison says, the two greatest tasks of a government are to, first, control the government and then control itself. That task the American Constitution does brilliantly.

3:27It is obsessed with the problem of absolute power. That's why it divides power, it checks it, and it balances it it incumbents these difficulties to the exercise of power. The individual is really sacrosanct in the American Constitutional framework. Not as much in the Indian one, though, of course, it's a real democracy, and there are real protections.