Legally, your chances of becoming an American citizen are by and large independent of the society from which you emigrated. Immigration cannot eliminate all the unfairness of citizenship. Naturalized citizens pay a price not unlike the one paid by the generation that created citizenship through bloodshed. In Canada, the price can be explicitly monetary. It is that one inevitably leaves behind the culture of one's upbringing and loses control over the loyalties of one's own children.
Assimilation is a form of symbolic violence.
Like the actual violence of war, assimilation is disruptive and heartless, the stuff of tragedy. Old ways of life are allowed to endure as sentimental memories, but as guides for conduct in the new world they are ruthlessly suppressed if they stand in the way of cultural integration. People with faint hearts who do not like hard choices ought not to consider immigration and assimilation. Still, for all its associated pain and even violence, immigration underscores the value of citizenship, for the native-born and the immigrant alike. By risking life and limb to obtain this dispensation, immigrants remind the native-born why what they take for granted is priceless.