Ghost wrote:MarcosZeitola wrote:The_Adventurer wrote:Actually, I wrote that wrong, since I, personally, have met very few. What I meant was that, looking at the information available on websites, blogs, articles, documentary films, and so on, about African immigrants throughout the world, the numbers are strikingly large.
While you are correct about the large numbers who resort to crime etc., There are still a considerable amount working in construction, cleaning toilets and doing other menial labour to support a life outside their home country.
Bottom line: they got out. They wanted out, and they got off their asses and risked life and limb to get where they are now. If some poor, starving Africans can do it, that means just about everybody else can too. To physically go from A to B without much of a plan, isn't hard to pull off. The hard part is what comes next. But nobody unattached, single and unemployed who hates where he's at and has a healthy pair of legs has any excuses not to pack his bags and go.
It seems to me that you are looking only at the successes while ignoring the failures, in the case of desperate third worlders.
A typical first world guy probably won't have lethal failures like third world guys would have to risk. But without proper planning and preparation, his failure could all but end his life back home. There is a balance to it.
Why you focusing on those who failed? You first have to understand how and why they failed. Some attach themselves to organized crime which almost always turns out badly, of the ones that make it.
The truth is many people don't want jobs as a cook, dish washer, maid, janitor, etc. Even I don't want those jobs, but I figured out other ways to make money, always have. I've spend a good part of the last twenty years employed, but in my 20's, I spent a good chunk of that unemployed officially. I made money as a DJ and still do on occasion. I didn't have to make the investment, my parents did, the benefits of being middle class.
The worse thing that can happen to you on the train coming up from Central America is getting thrown off it, but not everybody that is thrown off the train for refusing to give in to the banditos dies from his injuries or falls into a deep ravine.... The majority make it, ask anybody that's actually made the trip. The next step is having enough water to cross the desert, those that prepare tend to make it, those that don't or have a health issue tend not too.
Americans are full of excuses. There are plenty of stories of people hitching rides on freight trains. You could sell all your sh*t for a bus ticket or plane ticket, again are you willing to do it?
Most aren't so they stay right where they are.
I am one step closer to completing my goals for this year and the end goal was to be on a plane to Brazil. I could have bought a ticket this week but the restrictions on it, don't fit my time frame for going.