For junior Nanak Ofori-Mante, one manifestation of the “American Dream” is education. It’s why her parents, during the early 2000s, both moved from Accra, Ghana, to the United States, to study in U.S. colleges. Nanak believes they paved the way for her to excel.

“Coming here, creating a life, and then making life better for their kids,” Nanak said. “That’s what they achieved, because I’m here at Lab, a really good, educational school. So I think they achieved the American Dream.” 

Nanak is one of many members of the U-High community, who through family stories or personal experiences of immigration, believe they have reaped the benefits of the American Dream.

Middle school math teacher Beata Tully fled from the city of Trnava in Czechoslovakia during Communist rule, which lasted from 1948 to 1989, with her family. She remembers being hidden in the back of a car and driven across the Italian border to get to a refugee camp.

“In the middle of the night, my parents put my sister and I in a car, in the back seat, covered up with a blanket, and we… I believe it was the Italian border where my parents paid off the border people for us to get across the border to stay at the refugee camp,” Ms. Tully said. 

Ms. Tully believes strongly in the American Dream, and believes it has to do with America’s meritocratic society. 

“No matter what goes on in the world, in America you have the freedom to go to school where you want to go, no matter who you are, what you come from,” Ms. Tully, who holds degrees in physics, chemistry and math, said, “and I think that’s the part people sometimes forget.”

When considering the American Dream, senior Clara Blucher remembers her grandmother, Lillian Jaffe, who fled her home in France during the Holocaust. Because Ms. Jaffe had been born in Shanghai’s French Quarter, she was initially unable to come to the United States, and was stuck in Portugal, which was dangerous at the time. But eventually, after receiving an exemption, the Jaffe family was able to come to America. 

Clara is concerned that current attitudes toward immigration are destroying the American Dream. 

Clara said, “I don’t know if it was as much the American Dream as it was a quest for survival.”