the streets are paved with gold

"They think the streets are paved with gold here," she said.

Money grows on trees and the streets are paved with gold.

A lot of people who come from Europe fall on their noses because they think the streets are paved with gold.

They say the streets are paved with gold and everyone's a millionaire."

I felt I had to be close to the hub of what is going on, where the streets are paved with gold.

"The cupboards are bare but the streets are paved with gold."

He might as well be telling them the streets are paved with gold or he saw a dragon and a wizard.

A Chinese girl is rowing to America, "where the streets are paved with gold lame."

Within the city the local currency is tin, the streets are paved with gold, and the city is ruled by women.

"Republicans like Mr. Bloomberg describe the city as though the streets are paved with gold," he said.

As long as the United States is called the promised land where the streets are paved with gold, its myths are ripe for puncture.

Is it any surprise that Chinese peasants indenture themselves for $30,000 and travel for months in the holds of decrepit ships to the land where the streets are paved with gold?

Heavy metal band Iron Maiden has on the album The Final Frontier a song called "El Dorado" about selling the myth that "The streets are paved with gold"

When they talk about the money being spent, there is an eerie echo of the way foreigners used to talk about America: The streets are paved with gold - only now the streets are in Tokyo.

"They come for the same reason immigrants have always come: they think the streets are paved with gold," says Beverly Cheuvront, a spokeswoman for the Partnership for the Homeless, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Mo'atabar, whose duties approximated those of a sergeant to a commander of a hundred in the Herodian army, said, "Every day is feast day in Qushmarrah, where the streets are paved with gold."

Arriving in Lagos where he believes "the streets are paved with gold", he promptly moves into a dingy room owned by an equally greedy landlady simply known as Madam, a woman who believes that all problems can be solved with money, hence her catchphrase "It's a matter of cash!"

The minute-long Creole-language broadcasts, which began June 13, tell Haitians that economic refugees will not receive asylum, that the United States is not "a land where the streets are paved with gold" and that Haitians can apply for asylum at one of the three processing centers in Haiti.

"Everybody thinks the streets are paved with gold here and they find that is not the case," said Alan C. Nelson, a former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service who is now a consultant and lobbyist in Sacramento for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a national anti-immigration group.