HOW FREEDOM RINGS

By DINESH D'SOUZA

July 4, 2002 -- SINCE 9/11, we've heard a lot about "why they hate us." We've read countless articles on what's wrong with U.S. foreign policy and American culture. As an immigrant, I believe Americans also need to hear about what's right with America. Why does the United States magnetically attract immigrants by the millions? Why is the idea of America so fascinating to people, especially young people, all over the world?

The conventional wisdom is that immigrants come to America for one reason: to make money. This notion is conveyed endlessly in the "rags to riches" literature on immigrants, and it is reinforced by America's critics, who like to think of America as buying the affection of immigrants through the promise of making them filthy rich. But this Horatio Alger narrative is woefully incomplete; indeed, it misses the real attraction of America to immigrants and to people around the world.

The conventional account holds enough truth for surface plausibility. Certainly America offers a degree of mobility and opportunity unavailable elsewhere, not even in Europe. Only in America could Pierre Omidyar, whose ancestry is Iranian and who grew up in France, have started a company like eBay. Only in America could Vinod Khosla, the son of an Indian army officer, become a shaper of the technology industry and a billionaire to boot.

But America doesn't just provide unprecedented social mobility and opportunity, it gives a better life to the ordinary guy than does any other country. Let's be honest: Rich people live well everywhere. America's greatness is that it has extended the benefits of affluence, traditionally available to the very few, to a large segment in society.

We live in a nation where construction workers cheerfully spend $4 on a nonfat latte, where maids drive very nice cars, where plumbers take their families on vacation to St. Kitts. I recently asked an acquaintance in Bombay why he has been trying so hard to relocate to America. He replied, "I really want to move to a country where the poor people are fat."

The typical immigrant, who is used to the dilapidated infrastructure, mind-numbing inefficiency and multi-layered corruption of Third World countries, arrives in America to discover, to his wonder and delight, that everything works: The roads are clean and paper-smooth, the highway signs are clear and accurate, the public toilets function properly, when you pick up the telephone you get a dial tone, you can even buy things from the store and then take them back.

The American supermarket is a thing to behold: endless aisles of every imaginable product, many different types of cereal, 50 flavors of ice cream. The place is full of numerous unappreciated inventions: quilted toilet paper, fabric softener, cordless phones, disposable diapers and roll-on luggage.

So, yes, in material terms, America offers the newcomer a better life. Still, the material allure of America does not capture the deepest source of its appeal.

Recently, I asked myself how my life would have been different if I hadn't come to America. Raised in a middle-class family in India, I didn't have luxuries, but I didn't lack necessities. Materially, my life is better in the United States, but it is not a fundamental difference. My life has changed far more dramatically in other ways.

Had I remained in India, I would probably have lived my entire existence within a five-mile radius of where I was born. I would undoubtedly have married a woman of my identical religious and socioeconomic background, possibly someone selected by my parents. I would have faced relentless pressure to become an engineer or a doctor.

My socialization would have been entirely within my own ethnic community. I would have had a whole set of opinions that could be predicted in advance.

In sum, my destiny would, to a large degree, have been given to me.

By coming to America, I have seen my life break free of these traditional confines. At Dartmouth College, I became interested in literature, and switched my major to the humanities. Soon I developed a fascination with politics, and resolved to become a writer, which is something you can do in America, and which is not easy to do in India. I married a woman of English, Scotch-Irish, French and German ancestry.

Eventually, I found myself working in the White House, even though I was not an American citizen. I cannot imagine any other country allowing a non-citizen to work in its inner citadel of government.

In most of the world, even today, your identity and your fate are largely handed to you. This is not to say that you have no choice, but it is choice within given parameters.

In America, by contrast, you get to write the script of your own life. What to be, where to live, whom to love, whom to marry, what to believe, what religion to practice - these are all decisions that, in America, we make for ourselves. Here we are the architects of our own destiny.

"Self-determination" is the incredibly powerful idea that is behind the worldwide appeal of the United States. Young people throughout the world find irresistible the prospect of being in the driver's seat of their own lives.

So, too, the immigrant discovers that America permits him to break free of the constraints that have held him captive, so that the future becomes a landscape of his own choosing.

Dinesh D'Souza's latest book is "What's So Great About America." He is the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution. E-mail: thedsouzas@aol.com