LONDON – The world may be rethinking the American dream.
For many years, the United States has been viewed by people in other nations as a land of welcome and opportunity. However, President Donald Trump’s push for widespread deportations of migrants is causing unrest in places like Los Angeles, on college campuses, and even within churches. This has sparked a global reconsideration of the benefits and potential that America offers to newcomers.
“The current message from Washington suggests that newcomers are not welcome in the U.S.,” stated Edwin van Rest, CEO of Studyportals, a company that monitors the real-time online searches of international students interested in studying abroad. They have found that student interest in studying in America has reached its lowest point since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. “There are indeed excellent opportunities in other countries,” he noted.
For a long time, there has been an idealized view of immigration and America. In truth, the situation has been more complex, with race and ethnicity playing significant roles in the ongoing debate over who can be considered American. Nonetheless, the U.S. continues to attract people from around the world, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty’s invitation to the “huddled masses.” The robust economy has further encouraged millions more to come each year, contributing to a national population exceeding 340 million.
Early clues across industries — like tourism, trade, entertainment and education — suggest the American dream is fading for foreigners who have historically flooded to the U.S.
Polling by Pew Research Center from January through April found that opinions of the U.S. have worsened over the past year in 15 of the 24 countries it surveyed.
Trump and many of his supporters maintain that migrants in the country illegally threaten American safety, jobs and culture. But people in the country legally also have been caught in Trump’s dragnet. And that makes prospective visitors to the U.S., even as tourists, leery.
Trump’s global tariff war and his campaign against international students who have expressed pro-Palestinian sympathies stick especially stubbornly in the minds of people across American borders who for decades clamored to participate in the land of free speech and opportunity.
“The chances of something truly horrific happening are almost certainly tiny,” Duncan Greaves, 62, of Queensland, Australia, advised a Reddit user asking whether to risk a vacation to the land of barbeques, big sky country and July 4 fireworks. “Basically it’s like the Dirty Harry quote: ‘Do you feel lucky?’”
‘American Creed,’ American dilemma
For much of its history, America had encouraged immigration as the country sought intellectual and economic fuel to spur its growth.
But from the beginning, the United States has wrestled with the question of who is allowed to be an American. The new country was built on land brutally swiped from Native Americans. It was later populated by millions of enslaved Africans.
The American Civil War ignited in part over the same subject. The federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers for a decade. During World War II, the U.S. government incarcerated about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in 10 concentration camps. About two-thirds were U.S. citizens.
Still, the United States has always been a nation of immigrants, steered by the “American Creed” developed by Thomas Jefferson, which posits that the tenets of equality, hard work and freedom are inherently American.
Everyone, after all, comes from somewhere — a fact underscored on-camera in the Oval Office this month when German Chancellor Friedrich Merz gave the president the framed birth certificate of Trump’s grandfather, also named Friedrich, who emigrated from Germany in 1885. He was one of millions of Germans who fled war and economic strife to move to the United States in the late 19th Century.
There’s a story there, too, that suggests the Trump family knows both the triumphs of immigration and the struggle and shame of being expelled.
After marrying and making a fortune in America, the elder Trump attained U.S. citizenship and tried return to Germany. He was expelled for failing to complete his military service — and wrote about the experience.
“Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family,” Friedrich Trump wrote to Luitpold, prince regent of Bavaria in 1905, according to a translation in Harper’s magazine. “What will our fellow citizens think if honest subjects are faced with such a decree — not to mention the great material losses it would incur.”
Trump himself has married two immigrant women: the late Ivana Zelníčková Trump, of what’s now the Czech Republic, and his current wife, Melania Knauss Trump of Slovenia.
They’re still coming to America. To Trump, that’s long been a problem
It’s hard to overstate the degree to which immigration has changed the face and culture of America — and divided it.
Immigration in 2024 drove U.S. population growth to its fastest rate in 23 years as the nation surpassed 340 million residents, the U.S. Census Bureau said in December. Almost 2.8 million more people immigrated to the United States last year than in 2023, partly because of a new method of counting that adds people who were admitted for humanitarian reasons. Net international migration accounted for 84% of the nation’s 3.3 million-person increase in the most recent data reported.
Immigration accounted for all of the growth in 16 states that otherwise would have lost population, according to the Brookings Institution.
But where some Americans see immigration largely as an influx of workers and brain power, Trump sees an “invasion,” a longstanding view.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has initiated an far-reaching campaign of immigration enforcement that has pushed the limits of executive power and clashed with federal judges trying to restrain him over his invocation of special powers to deport people, cancel visas and deposit deportees in third countries.
In his second term, unlike his first, he’s not retreating from some unpopular positions on immigration. Instead, the subject has emerged as Trump’s strongest issue in public polling, reflecting both his grip on the Republican base and a broader shift in public sentiment. A June survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 46% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, which is nearly 10 percentage points higher than his approval rating on the economy and trade. The poll was conducted at the beginning of the Los Angeles protests and did not include questions about Trump’s military deployment to the city.
Other countries, such as Denmark, open their doors
The U.S. is still viewed as an economic powerhouse, though people in more countries consider China to be the world’s top economy, according to the Pew poll, and it’s unclear whether Trump’s policies could cause a meaningful drain of international students and others who feel under siege in the United States.
Netherlands-based Studyportals, which analyzes the searches for international schools by millions of students worldwide, reported that weekly pageviews for degrees in the U.S, collapsed by half between Jan. 5 and the end of April. It predicted that if the trend continues, the demand for programs in the U.S. could plummet further, with U.S. programs losing ground to countries like the United Kingdom and Australia.
“International students and their families seek predictability and security when choosing which country to trust with their future,” said Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA, which represents international educators. “The U.S. government’s recent actions have naturally shaken their confidence in the United States.”
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