American poet Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” in 1883 during an era of mass immigration to the New World as part of funding for France’s gift to the United States: the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty in New York. “‘Old land, preserve thy legendary pomp!’ she cried / with silent lips. ‘Take your weary, your poor, / your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / the wretched waste of your crowded shores. ” / Send me these homeless, storm-ridden ones, I raise my lamp by the Golden Gate!”
For millions of Americans voting with their feet in the 2020s, this phrase might be a French or Portuguese slogan. A strange thing is happening, the United States, which has long been a clear destination for people from around the world seeking new hope and a new life, is now starting to feel like the “old country” that people are quietly planning to leave. What’s more, it’s completely uncool to be American.
When George Clooney was granted French citizenship last year and confirmed that his family’s primary residence is now a farm in Provence, it sent a strong message about the status of the American Dream. Clooney has been unusually vocal about what the move represents: He’s betting that his children will have a “better life” in a country where fame is less important, privacy laws are stricter and childhoods are more ordinary than in Los Angeles.
Un-American Great Migration
He’s not the only one looking elsewhere. According to calculations by the Brookings Institution, in 2025, the United States will experience negative net immigration for the first time since the Great Depression, with an estimated loss of about 150,000 people. wall street journal. “Millions” of U.S. expats are increasingly choosing to study, work remotely and retire overseas, attracted by cheaper health care, safer streets and walkable cities where wages are higher in the U.S., the analysis found. According to Portugal’s Integration, Immigration and Asylum Agency, the number of U.S. residents in Portugal has increased by more than 500% since the pandemic began. In Spain and the Netherlands, Magazine According to reports, the number of Americans has almost doubled in the past decade, with more Americans moving to Germany and Ireland last year than Germans or Irish moving to the United States.
As venture capitalist Seth Levine and journalist Elizabeth MacBride have argued, the economic model has hollowed out the middle class and the stories that used to make people feel worth staying. exist capital evolutionThey argue that “shareholder-only capitalism does not work” and treats workers and communities as “extractable resources”, creating “unsustainable rifts in our economies and societies.” They point out that since the late 1970s, CEO pay has soared by more than 900%, while pay for average workers has barely budged, and the odds of someone born into poverty being in the top quartile of the wealth distribution have dropped from about one in four to about one in 20. “By basic measures,” Levine told me. wealth “We’ve failed to provide economic mobility,” he said in a recent interview, noting that the average age of first-time homebuyers is about 40 years old, compared with the mid-20s a few decades ago.
Meanwhile, McBride told wealth She sees the consequences of emotions and actions, not just statistics. She said people no longer feel that “playing by the rules of the system will get them anywhere,” a breakdown reflected in declining life expectancy and what she calls a “crisis of white male suicide.” For her, the loss of faith is as important as any GDP figure: “Middle class” has always been partly a narrative – a sense that society is working for you – and that narrative has frayed. “We have to rebuild the narrative of the middle of the country,” she argued, not for nostalgia’s sake but for a new story fit for a more diverse, unequal, and anxious America.
But it’s much more than that. As the idea of the middle class as a distinct group that can grow and prosper in the United States declines, America’s status as a global symbol of fashion is also at risk of declining. A generation ago, blue jeans, Michael Jordan, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s played a major role in the West winning the Cold War. (Boris Yeltsin also took a fateful trip to a Western supermarket when he realized how big the quality-of-life gap was.) As Gen Z grows up globally via social media, they are increasingly discovering that basically all the cool stuff is overseas.
Calm down, man
Political scientist Seva Gunitsky believes that America’s soft power is undergoing a “slow erosion” as its once unparalleled cultural dominance gives way to real competition from Europe, Asia and Latin America.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Clooney’s Wheelhouse: The Movie . Over two decades, Hollywood’s share of the global box office has dropped from about 92% to about 66%, while China’s share has almost tripled. The state even goes a step further, wall street journalEric Schwartzel writes in his 2022 book red carpetUncovering China’s long-running campaign to learn the secrets of Hollywood and then essentially lock it out of the local box office. As a result, all the top ten movies in China last year were domestically produced. The sudden reversal of this trend only highlights China’s growing cultural influence, as Disney’s Zootopia 2 It became a billion-dollar-plus phenomenon after China decided to screen it there.
On Netflix, foreign-produced content is taking over American screens. One-third of the streaming content Americans watch now comes from non-English-language content, a growing trend that has seen a 71% increase in streaming of non-English-language content among Americans since 2019. The trend is even more pronounced in music: as K-pop and Latin music surge, the share of English-language songs in the world’s top 10,000 most streamed songs fell from 67% in 2021 to 55% in 2024.
Gen Z’s tastes epitomize this shift. On social media, when the U.S. TikTok ban was imminent, young Americans turned to the Chinese platform Xiaohongshu and began to “sinicize” – drinking porridge, cooking apples, doing Tai Chi, wearing slippers and other Chinese lifestyle habits at home. Influencers exchange tips on hot water, qigong exercises and traditional Chinese therapies, while Chinese state media casts the trend as a victory for soft power. For decades, China has been an economic powerhouse with little prestige in Western culture. But now it finds itself enjoying a boost in soft power at a time when the United States is losing some of its global appeal.
study time
Even America’s old role as the world’s classroom is being eroded. New international student enrollment at U.S. universities fell 17% last year, while the number of Americans heading to Europe for degree programs has doubled since 2011. The number of US universities in the top 500 has hit a record low in global rankings, with Times Higher Education officials describing the shift in higher education’s focus from the US to Asia as a “dramatic and accelerating trend”.
None of this means that the United States has become a backwater. It still ranks high on many indicators of cultural influence and remains the largest economy in the world. But when Hollywood royalty moves to Provence, remote workers move from Dallas to Berlin, and Gen Z wellness trends hit Beijing and Seoul instead of Brooklyn and Silver Lake, the pattern is hard to ignore. To its own citizens and the next generation of cool hunters, America begins to feel less like the future and more like the old country you left to build a different life elsewhere.
Levine and McBride do not advocate abandoning capitalism; They argue that it has mutated into so-called “dynamic capitalism,” a chaotic in-between state where neoliberalism has effectively ended but a new equilibrium has not yet been reached. Their core proposal is an “ownership economy” that spreads equity more broadly through worker ownership and wider access to private markets, and restructures capitalism so that it “works for the people, not the other way around.” In their narrative, rebuilding the American middle class and restoring any leadership depends less on slogans about exceptionalism than on whether ordinary people once again believe they have a real stake in the system. In other words, if they feel they have a stake in the system, they are likely to stay.
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com
