Why have so many immigrants sought out new lives in America? | Francis Ford Coppola
About this video
Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola explains why his family and many others left Europe for America. His family came from the poorest part of southern Italy, a land long controlled by other powers and offering little opportunity. America represented the dream of freedom, opportunity and a future free of Europe's rigid social establishments.
You'll be able to
- describe the conditions that pushed Coppola's family to leave Italy.
- explain what drew immigrants to America, using the idea of the American dream.
- compare 'push' and 'pull' reasons for immigration.
Key words
- Immigration
- Moving to a new country to live there permanently.
- American dream
- The idea that anyone in America can build a better life through opportunity and hard work.
- Establishment
- The powerful groups and fixed social order that control a society.
Transcript
From the countries that produced this great wave of immigration, the conditions were difficult. Just as it is today for certain people coming out of Latin America and of Central America, my family came from the poorest section of Italy. Italy is a long peninsula. The North was influenced more by the Austrians and the French, and the South was more in this big wong peninsula influenced by the Ottoman, the Arabs, and oddly enough the French came to Sicily. Italy was always under control of some other country and incredibly poor, and there was no opportunity there. It was always the new world. To go to America was the dream of you could make a life, you could be free of the strict levels of life that existed in Europe and in America, you could have what we know as the American dream, and they came for it. Many were given that.
People came to America for the opportunity to have a future to be rid of the establishments that had choked Europe, and America was the land of the free.
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