If America is so bad, why move here?

True, I lived there and have seen it. The burden every American carries is that the rest of the world sees the USA only one way and, unfortunately, it's an impression Americans themselves have promoted. What America offers the world is not the fact that you're rich, it's the social, political and economic freedom to be what you want to be through personal achievement. You've taken in the poor and dispossessed from throughout the world and took their shackles off. Great things have been accomplished and it has made America wealthy. I'm a big fan of America, but my admiration is for the country it once was, not for the country it is becoming since the banksters have taken over. It is not the corporations that have ruined America, a corporation is merely one way of structuring a business, it is the fluid movement of top level people between government and the financial industry. The regulation of the financial industry is weak because the Treasury Department and the executives of Goldman Sachs are one and the same people.

Just for some qualifiers, since some of you folks don't seem to take a person seriously unless they have some kind of Polish street cred, I'm a first-generation American who is fluent in Polish and travels internationally on a regular basis. I have always been equally proud of both my nationality and cultural heritage and feel that I have had the best of both worlds in being brought up this way.

That said, I find all the backbiting between nations on this forum really depressing. I find myself brought here on occasion by various Google searches, and every time it only takes one or two posts for something disrespectful or crass about the States to appear. I don't like to spend too much time on this forum due to all the overt, unnecessarily rude comments about Americans, first-generation or otherwise.

This forum does have its fair share of intelligent discourse (really, most of it is this way), but I find it embarrassing that quite a few of you allow yourselves to view either Poland or the United States through the lens of simple stereotypes. So many conversations that start out in a promising way end up deteriorating into stupid, jingoistic name-calling. It is possible to have intelligent and courteous debate about the merits and faults of a nation's politics, culture and people. The trolls among you should take note.

I've rarely seen a USA person to be able to take critism or disinterest in them or their country in a normal manner. It seems its always "Either you are with me or against me" for them. This is unfortunate and sign of a very violent inner nature which suffocates the TRUE FREEDOM of everyone and propogates its own form of freedom where whatever it does, whatever it may be like ... people must obey to its ways, its perspectives, its values and ideals, its dictatorship around the world and their own affairs. Everyone must say "Ohhhh wow!!!!.... UsAaAaaAa.... my dReAm.... OhHhHh how I wanna be there OhHhHh.... Hail Hail Hail!!!" ... only then you are a GOOD MAN. But hey...beware lest you say "doh whatever ... not interested ... US or what?... whatever.... fine come like any other tourist and HEY??? What do you mean why if you are so bad why come???... We're not interested in your good or bad as long as you keep your arrogant nature in a distance, and no! Most of us are not interested to MOVE to your place"

Be happy and remember, every nation respects themselves ... and dont make a fool of yourself thinking that we are dying to come to you. Yes, there are poors and who dont see anything for them unless they move into the USA labor market .... but remove that and USA is nothing interesting for anyone in this world.

To be free a person must be ready internally, being in USA doesnt give it. Freedom is bigger than your country where you are yourself fighting for it everyday and getting beaten up on streets just for protesting (which ironically doesnt get aired...iron curtain?)...

Anyways ... still I would respect all those good people who live in USA and know which word to use where .... surely they are not ignorant and arrogant, and feel ashamed of those who display it (like in this thread, and the usa ppl posting here).

Another thing...STOP calling yourself "America" ... America is bigger than USA ... are you ashamed to take your countries name that you have to bring in a continent to identify yourself?....

Poles always called their country Poland first and then a part of Europe ... not the other way round.

Really? Visit my classroom sometime or meet my other American friends. The US has faults-every country does-and we talk about them freely and openly.


This is pure poppycock. It's not worth discussing.


Why? The country is the United States of America, so we call ourselves Americans. We're well aware that there are other countries in North, Central and South America. If they call themselves Canadians or Mexicans, they're also North Americans. The same is true for our brothers and sisters farther to the south.

It's more that an outsider is unwelcome to complain and critisize... but it's a norm in every country Poland, Britain, USA - no difference in these terms.

What are we supposed to call ourselves? Yanks?

yankee doodle dandys with sugar sprinkles..?
no really, Americans are Americans, don't listen to him, someone must have rocked his boat....

I'm "dying" to stop hearing all this horse$hit.

You hate the USA, we get it.

I don't. But alas your dictionary seem to be confined to this: "You are either with us, or against us".

The last two sentences of your post actually promote each other - one leads onto the other.

Anyway I think you'll actually find that lately the favourite subject seems to be Russia.

I Honestly couldn't care less - love us, hate us, it's all the same to me and most Americans ;)

At any Airport (not in America) no matter which one you're at as long as its international theres always some loud mouthed friggen yank, deliberately talking loud as if he wants everyone and their dog to know "I'm from the USA" you can hear them a mile away.

Its like ohh for fcuk sake there's another one. I dont hear any other countries national's doing this...... We are all polite and normal. South Africans, Ozzies, Germans, Brits, French etc etc, but the yanks love shouting their fcuking mouths off at airports.

If you start talking to them its LA this and California that and OHH New York, you just feel like telling them to shut the fcuk up.

You can't understand why people think the USA is a **** hole, get over it.

do you actually have any reasons Weg, or are you just going to jump in with your usual little dig and then never be seen on the thread again? Kind of like a big street fight and then weg jumps in and taps a guy in the head then goes running off telling everybody how he punched some guy......

If someone said that Poland was a $hithole, would you understand?

If you don't like America or Americans and believe it to be inferior to your tastes simply stay away from here.

No one is going to USA from here plasticpole. Ironically you are in Polish forums instead. :)

We are warm and respectable enough to listen to you, but we do maintain our right to clarify your misconceptions. Plus, I never saw a thread by Poles saying similar things to USA people. We never have been this arrogant, maybe its just not a part of us.

Right. I'm sure everybody believes this happy horsesh*t.

that is true, they talk so loud and so opinionated, I had to tell a bunch of em to shut the uck up on the train to Brighton not long ago, they were shouting their heads off all about what was wrong with British society. One of them then screeched at me 'it's a free country ladeeeeeeeeee'...you couldn't make it up, could you?

Then again, are these arrogant gobshytes we hear in Europe really representative of the American people?
I like to think not.

"No one is going to USA from here plasticpole". That is quite a dumb thing to say, exactly how many millions do you claim to represent? Obviously people are going to America, always have, always will.

I answer if I can be bothered, this argument has been done many times before and there isn't much more to be said.


Yes. In many ways it is, but that's because it was dirt poor, a situation that is changing dramatically for the better. Something that cannot be said for the US, its only way is down. It will get very ugly there.


About 8000 Poles emigrated to the US in 1996. there were about 70k Polish illegals in 1996.

infoplease.com/ipa/A0201398.html
dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/illegal.pdf

For F***'s sake. More Poles emigrated to the UK in 5 years than emigrated to the US in the last 150 years.

I think you will find that more Poles emigrate to every individual country in the EU than the US in any given year.

oh that's genius. you've never seen a thread, "If Poland is so bad, why move here?". hahahaha. yes. yes, as a matter of fact,

i'd put money on it that you've never seen anything like that.


This comment speaks volumes about not only peterweg but so many other posters.

Accurate, reality-based commentators, yes. I think you will find many of your countrymen would agree with us.

The facts speak for themselves, Poles don't want to move to the US as its unappealing. Those that do probably move there to be with family as much as anything - if they want work they move around Europe.

Probably true. Could that be attributed to the necessity of getting a visa to go go to the US?

A visa is needed to visit on holiday, we are talking about going to live and work.

Country of Stay Number of emigrants (in thousands)

Year 2002** 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
TOTAL 786 1,000 1,450 1,950 2,270 2,210
Europe 461 770 1,200 1,610 1,925 1,887 of which:
European Union 451 750 1,170 1,550 1,860 1,820 (27 countries)*** of which:
Austria 11 15 25 34 39 40
Belgium 14 13 21 28 31 33
Cyprus - - - - 4 4
Denmark - - - - 17 19
Finland 0.3 0.4 0.7 3 4 4
France 21 30 44 49 55 56
Greece 10 13 17 20 20 20
Spain 14 26 37 44 80 83
Ireland 2 15 76 120 200 180
Netherlands 10 23 43 55 98 108
Germany 294 385 430 450 490 490
Portugal 0.3 0.5 0.6 1 1 1
Czech Republic - - - - 8 10
Sweden 6 11 17 25 27 29
United Kingdom 24 150 340 580 690 650
Italy 39 59 70 85 87 88

Countries outside the European Union 10 20 30 60 65 67 of which:
Norway - - - - 36 38

migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=800

Table 4

So the US is up there with Czech Republic and some what less than say, UK, Ireland or Germany

huh?

Detroit, current status: 'Detroit has closed schools and laid off police in an effort to avoid a bankruptcy filing this year. Home prices are down 54% the past three years, worst in the U.S. The median price was $38,000 last year in the Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn metro division.' realestate.yahoo/promo/americas-most-miserable-cities-2012.html

Hello all, I am a third generation Polish-American (just discovered this finally) who is very interested in this topic because I share the same sentiment of those who do not live in America about America, and I live here. To forewarn; I do not hate America nor Americans (I'd hate myself), this is about why I wouldn't want to move here if I was outside of America. Now I do wish to leave America for good and move to Poland; after all God moved my great-grandfather out of Poland during the many occupations and invasions, saving him and eventually bringing me into the picture so that I may give God glory, and why should I refuse to accept that which God has given me? So of those who are actually in Poland and are Pole's, I am curious about the political sphere of a personal Pole, and here is why:

The typical American will have around $40,000 in debt with significant interest rates by the time they graduate college. This typical American will then find a job that is not what he (I will use the male identifier for all people) got his degree in and does not pay enough to what he expected upon graduating with his BA. So this American will then borrow around $10,000 for a new car (minimum) and get their Masters as well, which will put this American at around $90,000 in debt by the time they are 28 years old, they get a little bit of a better job. This American has bills they have to pay and by the time they get to their loans they are able to pay back, maybe, $3,000 a year. With interest rates at 6.8 percent (which is the bare minimum and very unrealistic to be this low) adding $6,120 a year onto the debt they are probably going to pay the interest itself and some of the loan if they are having a good year. A significant portion of their youth and mid 50's are spent paying off all their debt, by the time they get to retire they might be able to say every dollar they earn is their's. The American Nightmare is to never borrow money and own cheaper things that is fully their own. Is this every single American in the whole country? No, infants are usually born with no debt, toddlers don't have debt, and most pre-teens don't have debt.

Our country is a country that is all about indentured-servanthood and having no money and lots of nice things.
I am a man who wants to raise kids who have a high quality of life, not a high income, high debt, and high stress due to the climate of debt. And many poor people in other countries (in the American mind) have money that is probably all their own money that doesn't have to be given to someone else they own (unless they are currently occupied).

I also was told by a German Foreign Exchange Student that college is considered public education in Germany and consequently is free. So their are kids that are younger then me who have a BA and didn't pay anything for it!

So as an American, I am being honest about my own country, this is our reality, I know I am only a 24 year old kid in a lot of peoples eyes and so I could be speaking out of naivety.

America also has flawed logic, we have this misunderstanding that individuality and ambiguity is really great. So we have dissolution of gender roles (because supposedly men and women are exactly the same except genitals) which leads to women aggressively controlling men and men hiding away in their man-caves to play video games 10 hours a day; this is a country where we believe that in order to be great you have to come up with something so original it blows everyone else's minds and you then are ushered into fame. A country where we ogle people because they can act poorly in horrible movies.

Do I do this, from time-to-time, I am not completely innocent. But I am not impressed either by our countries "wealth" or "power" and know that life is bigger and beyond those things. I want to live in an environment where my kids can learn and be intelligent human beings who (our education system is the crappy toilet paper no one wants to use but has to) can continue to educate themselves on their own and can appreciate life today and live in today and not tomorrow (which a living-in-debt society can't do well). Can I do this in America, sure, but doesn't mean I have to revoke my choices.

enjoy your evenings,
Mr. R.

Geez, you too? We already have a third generation Pol-Am on PF, I really hope, you are not him or just like him. It would be extremely hard to handle another one of that kind.

My Polish uncle told me how he got into $400k debt (in Nevada) and went bankrupt. I don't know how a prison guard, who moonlighted as a security guard, was given so much credit.

and yet, sooooo many people have come here.....and millions continue to.....every......single......year. it MUST be a total $hit hole.

reading posts like this absolutely crack me up. this guy's got it all figured out. just another young kid who just got done reading a month's worth of statistics about "us vs. them" and is just running with it. He's an over the top holy roller on top of that.

listen young whipper snapper....your life is not going to make some miraculous change by moving to Poland. you are who you are and if you think going to Poland is going to somehow transform your life, you are mistaken. all the things you want in life are nowhere more readily available than in the good ole' USA. it's simple dude.....don't be a statistic! just because "the average American does x, y, and z" doesn't mean you have to as well. I lived in Poland for 4 years and never wore a track suit, didn't practice religion, didn't watch soccer, thought Polish beer kinda sucked, refused to eat paczki for breakfast.....I could go on and on. You're trying to run from something and whatever it is, it is going to get right on the plane with you if you decide to move. Do what you want, but "the cure" doesn't lie in Poland, a place you know next to nothing about.