America is known as the land of opportunities. Thus, people from different parts of the world flee to America for that reason. Although we cannot consider ourselves a nation because we share nothing in common except for our government. The definition of a nation, as found in the dictionary, states "a people who share common customs, origins, history, and frequently language; a nationality" (www.dictionary.com). So, for that reason America cannot be considered a nation. People living within the United States still live their lives as they would in their native land. Therefore, the following are barriers of which stand in the way of calling America a "nation" - ethnicity, language and racism.
Different ethnicities have different ways of seeing things and carries out different kinds of traditions. Even though many different races live in the United States that does not mean that they all celebrate every single holiday there is. For example, not everyone celebrates Christmas. There are different ethnicities that have the same general idea of Christmas, but it is not celebrated in the same manner, such as the African-Americans. They, on the other hand celebrate Kwanzaa, which is a seven-day celebration. Another example of holiday traditions would be Halloween. For Americans on Halloween, people of every age would dress up in costumes of all sorts and go trick-or-treating. Mexicans too celebrate a type of Halloween, but theirs mainly focuses on the remembrance of their dead ancestors, which is called the Day of the Dead. Therefore, since we have so many different ethnicities living in the United States, it is hard to convert everyone and have them take on the American traditions.
The variety of languages throughout the country sometimes makes it hard for us to communicate with each other. The main cause of this is that people from all over the world immigrate to the United States and some not even knowing the language.