To say that the slogan “America First” has a checkered past in the United States is an understatement of epic proportions. Launched in the spring of 1940 on the eve of Hitler’s conquest of France, Belgium and Holland, the America First Committee was an isolationist crusade which grew to 800,000 members who sought the keep the U.S. out of any war with Germany. But that’s not all. After the trauma of the Great Depression, its leadership was rife with anti-Semites and Nazi sympathizers like Olympic Committee Chairman Avery Brundage, auto magnate Henry Ford and the world-famous pilot Charles Lindbergh who saw European fascism—and not American democracy—as the wave of the future. In September 1941, just three months before Pearl Harbor and Adolf Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States, Lindbergh proclaimed, “The British and the Jewish races for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war." The greatest of the dangers Jews posed to the United States, he warned, “lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.”
At a time when the United States faced a monumental choice between good and evil, human rights and barbarous slaughter, freedom and enslavement, the America Firsters were on the wrong side of history. Ultimately and at great cost, the forces of light prevailed in Europe and the Pacific, but not before vanquishing the forces of darkness here at home.
Now, as Americans confront a new crossroads in history, Donald Trump’s 21st century incarnation of the America First movement threatens to once again take the nation down a dangerously mistaken—and irreversible—path. After 25 years, America’s unipolar moment of unrivalled military dominance is coming to a close, as rising Chinese power around the world, resurgent Russian expansionism in Eastern Europe and a nuclear North Korea means the United States can no longer strike at the times and places of its choosing without painful consequences. Never again will the U.S. account for half of world GDP, as it did after the destruction of its economic competitors in World War II. Globalization, the seamless flow of capital (and capitalists) across national boundaries, the transformational impact of climate change, and, above all, China’s ever-increasing role in the worldwide economy require Washington to think anew and act anew. And more and more, the United States will be less and less able to act alone.
That’s why the world Donald Trump and his die-hard followers scorn is not the one they, or any of us, actually inhabit. A year ago at the Republican National Convention, Trump declared “our plan will put America First. Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.” Nothing about the first six months of the Trump administration supports the May 30 op-ed penned by national security adviser H.R. McMaster and National Economic Council director Gary D. Cohn that “America First” is also “a commitment to protecting and advancing our vital interests while also fostering cooperation and strengthening relationships with our allies and partners.” As Trump put it in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2017:
From this moment on, it’s going to be America First. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families.
As it turns out, not so much.
Consider, for example, current U.S. policy on climate change. It’s not just that the Trump administration is firing scientists, gutting the EPA, shuttering offices related to climate research and creating “red teams” to counter the clear scientific consensus on climate change. When Donald Trump exited the Paris climate agreement on June 1, he wasn’t content to sneer that “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” He added that “the United States will cease all implementation of the nonbinding Paris accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country.”
But major U.S. companies and other nations are not persuaded by Trump’s claim that climate change is a “hoax” perpetrated by China. Leaving aside for the moment that minor detail that the future of the earth hangs in the balance, other nations have embraced those “financial and economic burdens” because they are investing in the commanding heights of the 21st century global economy. While Team Trump lies to coal miners about the return of jobs that are never coming back thanks to the low cost of natural gas and other alternatives, China, Germany, France, and other countries are focused on where the good paying jobs will be generated. The nations that lead the development and manufacturing of solar panel technologies, wind turbines, large-scale battery production and energy storage, and the deployment of “smart grid” will capture the jobs that go with them.
China leads the world in renewable energy production, employment and market share.
It’s no wonder French President Emmanuel Macron responded to Trump’s abdication of U.S. climate leadership with an invitation to American scientists. “To all scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, responsible citizens who were disappointed by the decision of the president of the United States, I call on them: Come and work here, with us.” As WGBH reported this week, some, like Ashley Ballantyne, are taking Macron up on his offer. With political support and research funding drying up, Ballantyne said:
“It used to be that European scientists would come to the US for opportunities. But I think the tides are turning, and there have been several really well-respected, midcareer scientists leaving for institutions in Germany and Switzerland and France [and] England. … In some respects, there’s been a bit of a reverse brain drain.”
Donald Trump’s so-called “America First” immigration policies aren’t going to improve that situation, either.
The damage began almost immediately with the newly inaugurated president’s Muslim travel ban. Despite an intelligence report from the Department of Homeland Security that immigrants from seven majority Muslim countries had not and did not represent a threat of terrorism to the United States, Trump went ahead with his prohibition on refugees and visa holders from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Sudan and Somalia. As one commander of Iraqi troops fighting alongside American advisers in Mosul put it, Trump’s move was “an insult to their dignity.”
"If America doesn't want Iraqis because we are all terrorists, then America should send its sons back to Iraq to fight the terrorists themselves."
But the Trump ban, still being contested in the courts, threatens to hurt Americans at home. The pain starts in the tourism industry, where the perception among travelers is that the United States simply isn’t as welcoming as it once was. As the Washington Post reported in April:
The result could be an estimated 4.3 million fewer people coming to the United States this year, resulting in $7.4 billion in lost revenue, according to Tourism Economics, a Philadelphia-based analytics firm. Next year, the fallout is expected to be even larger, with 6.3 million fewer tourists and $10.8 billion in losses. Miami is expected to be hit hardest, followed by San Francisco and New York, the firm said.
It should come as no surprise that flight searches to the U.S. are down from almost every country except one: Russia.
But the blowback doesn’t end there. Foreign students now top one million of the enrollments in America’s colleges and universities. They contribute more than $32 billion annually to the U.S. economy. But by mid-March, America’s institutions of higher education were already suffering from the impact of Trump’s travel ban. A survey of 250 schools by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers found that nearly 40 percent were experiencing declines in applications from international students, with the biggest fall-offs from the Middle East. And this all comes at a time when the clear global dominance of American universities has begun to slip, especially as China makes massive investments of its own.
On March 18, the New York Times revealed another side effect of the Trump visa program changes having an immediate, negative impact nationwide. From coal miners in Pennsylvania to oil field workers in North Dakota, the Times reported, “rural areas brace for a doctor shortage due to visa policy.”
About 25 percent of all physicians practicing or training in the United States are foreign, but in some inner cities and most rural areas, that share is significantly higher.
Significantly higher, indeed. “In Great Falls, Mont.,” the Times explained, “60 percent of the doctors who specialize in hospital care at Benefis Health System, which serves about 230,000 people in 15 counties, are foreign doctors on work visas.”
With the fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding Trump’s immigration plans, high tech workers who might have been drawn to Silicon Valley, Austin, Seattle or Raleigh are looking north—and south. Canada and Mexico have been only too happy to welcome them.
But the United States doesn’t just need immigrants to help provide the next generation of computer programmers, genetic researchers, physicians and entrepreneurs. America needs agricultural workers, grocers, health care workers, hospitality staff, drivers and more—and needs them now. This isn’t so much a question of doing jobs Americans won’t or at wages they won’t accept. This is about demographics and productivity.
In a nutshell, America and its work force are getting old. As Vox recently reported, “The Administration on Aging estimates that the fraction of the United States population age 60 or older will increase from 18.4 percent in 2010 to 22.2 percent in 2020.” And as research from the RAND Corporation, Harvard Medical School and the International Monetary Fund revealed, “older workforces are less productive on a per-worker basis.” Just why this is the case is unclear. But the impact of an aging labor pool is lower productivity and slower GDP growth.
As the IMF documented, this process is more damaging to EU members than the United States. There’s no mystery as to why: the U.S. has enjoyed both higher birth rates and higher levels of immigration. But now, those related American competitive advantages are at risk of narrowing. In 2016, the U.S. fertility rate dropped for the sixth straight year to its lowest level ever. With 62 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, the United States fertility rate has now dropped below the population replacement level. But as statistician and demographer Brady Hamilton of the National Center for Health Statistics said reassuringly:
“Yes, it’s below replacement level but not dramatically so. We have a high level of influx of immigrants that compensates for it.”
Which is why Donald Trump of all people needs an increase in immigration. And not because he, like many others who run resorts, depend on seasonal foreign workers. Instead, White House Trump needs higher immigration to keep the promise of four percent economic growth made by candidate Trump.
As the White House web site says, “To get the economy back on track, President Trump has outlined a bold plan to create 25 million new American jobs in the next decade and return to 4 percent annual economic growth.” During the presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly promised to deliver that four percent GDP target or even more. As he put it in September 2015:
“We are looking at a 3% but we think it could be 5 [percent] or even 6 [percent]. We are going to have growth that will be tremendous.”
Leave aside that no American president since LBJ averaged four percent yearly growth over his tenure in the White House. (Not once in their combined 12 years in the Oval Office did Bush 41 and Bush achieve that annual target. ) Since 2000, GDP growth has averaged a little less than two percent a year. Since the Great Recession of 2008 hit, labor productivity has expanded by less than one percent a year. As Neil Irwin explained in the New York Times last September, that means Trump can't get there from here. Our aging population and his planned crackdown on immigration mean a return to the boom days of 1950 to 1973 simply isn't in the cards:
Add it all up, and is Mr. Trump's promise of 25 million new jobs over the next decade and 3.5 percent annual economic growth possible? Only if a burst of innovation arrives that makes every worker's labor go further, and if millions of new immigrants arrive from overseas or the ratio of American adults who want to work rises far higher than it has ever been. Absent all that, the math just doesn't work.
Donald Trump needs increased immigration to have any chance of hitting his 4% GDP target.
All of which is why Trump’s Wednesday announcement of support for the Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy (RAISE) Act is the worst kind of America Firstism. Despite the overwhelming consensus of economists across the political spectrum that immigrants are good for the American economy and the federal budget, the bill co-sponsored by Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and David Perdue (R-GA) would move to a “merit-based” system that would cut the number of new arrivals annually from roughly one million to about 540,000 within a decade. The emphasis on skills and the ability to speak English are clearly red meat tossed to the likes of Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Iowa Rep. Steve King, a man who proclaimed in May, “You cannot rebuild your civilization with somebody else's babies.”
Of course, the history of the United States of America is precisely one of men, women and their babies from everywhere in the world (millions of them enslaved) building the nation. As ThinkProgress noted in April:
That immigrants are an economic benefit for the country — has been consistently proven true. More than half of U.S. firms that are valued at $1 billion or more, had at least one immigrant co-founder, according to a 2016 National Foundation for American Policy study. One-quarter of engineering and technology companies started in the United States between 2006 and 2012 had at least one founder who was an immigrant.
“Immigration,” 1,500 economists said in their letter to President Trump, “is one of America’s significant competitive advantages in the global economy.” That’s certainly not a message the #MAGA crowd wants to hear or is willing to believe.
Immigrants, documented or undocumented, are a convenient, time-tested scapegoat looking to place blame on someone for slow economic growth, stagnant wages and declining social status. But the Trump administration’s “America First” immigration plan will make the United States less globally competitive, not more. The same is true of what Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Mick Mulvaney called an “America First: A Budget Blueprint Designed to America Great Again.”
Trump’s “America First” budget would build up defense and gut everything else.
Trump’s budget request for fiscal year 2018 is not going to become law, and with good reason. His “America First” budget gives a 10 percent funding increase to the Pentagon and 6.8 percent more to the Department of Homeland Security, and cuts everything else. The proposed spending reductions are staggering: nearly 29 percent for the State Department, 14 percent for education, 31 percent for the EPA and so on. Non-defense discretionary spending—that is, everything outside of DoD, Social Security, interest on the national debt, Medicare, Medicaid and other legislatively mandated health care spending—would be reduced to its smallest share of the U.S. economy since Herbert Hoover. All the investments in America’s future growth and standard of living, including education, Pell Grants, research and development, transportation and infrastructure, would be gutted. All of this comes at a time when China is investing $300 billion in its “Made in China 2025” program with the aim of achieving self-sufficiency or leadership in self-driving cars, aviation AI, computer chips and more.) If Uncle Sam has become (as many have said) “an insurance company with an army,” it won’t be a prosperous one.
Under Trump’s plan, spending on science, education, R&D and transportation would almost disappear.
Non-defense discretionary spending is already down to 1950’s levels, Trump would go back to Hoover.
Trump’s protectionist trade policies certainly won’t Make America Great Again. Wherever you stand on multilateral trade deals (and there are plenty of opponents in both parties), there’s little doubt that candidate Trump’s threatened 35 percent tariff on imports from Mexico and 45 percent on goods from China would have triggered a devastating trade war cost millions of Americans their jobs and all consumers higher prices. (Ironically, such a move slamming the Mexican economy could reverse the decline in undocumented immigration from south of the border.) Citing “bad deals,” Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and demanded to renegotiate NAFTA and instead focus on bilateral agreements with nations like the post-Brexit UK.
Again, whatever you think of those deals, international trade is increasingly a lot like picking an airline:
We know you have a choice of trading partners, so thank you for choosing the United States of America. We look forward to exchanging goods and services with you again soon.
Donald Trump has made that choice much harder for both America’s partners. Even as Australians increasingly see China as a military threat, Beijing’s outsized impact on Canberra’s economy puts the Aussies’ relationship with China on an equal footing with the U.S. After Trump turned his back on the TPP, the G20 turned its back on him. The European Union and Japan are wrapping up a major deal giving each preferential access to the other’s markets, access the United States will not enjoy. China, which has already seen growing momentum for its Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) as an alternative to the IMF, is similarly minding the gap in Europe left by the United States.
To add insult to injury, America’s position in the world is jeopardized by Donald Trump himself. When the president of the United States praises dictators, declares that America is little different than Vladimir Putin’s Russia (“There are a lot of killers. You think our country's so innocent?”), and has the secretary of state remove democracy promotion as part of his Department’s mission, the American brand is diminished. American “soft power” is undermined. With Donald Trump in the White House, the United States cannot use its defense of human rights as a beacon to the world or as a bludgeon against rogue states. National security experts, economists and generals alike have all warned Trump that he is “surrendering America’s soft power.” To put it another way, Donald Trump has redefined #MAGA to mean “Make America Globally Absent.”
As with a fish, the rot in the “America First” movement starts at the head. In June 2017, the Pew Research Center reported survey findings that showed “U.S. Image Suffers as Publics Around World Question Trump’s Leadership.” These were perhaps the least surprising polling results in American history. As it turns out, they were foreshadowed by Pew’s work a year ago, which showed other nations had great confidence in President Obama and his would-have-been Democratic successor, Hillary Clinton, but virtually none in Donald Trump.
In June, Pew surveys found that a lack of confidence in Donald Trump was hurting America...
...exactly as its polls predicted a year earlier.
“When you come to a fork in the road,” the former New York Yankees great Yogi famously said, “Take it!” Confronted with the specter of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, Americans rejected cowardice, bigotry, hatred and retreat. But in 2016, we didn’t heed the lesson of 1940 and instead chose the path of “America First.” This time, we chose poorly. In the face of a new, multi-polar world, we lost our way and elevated those vices into virtues. It’s not too late to stop our descent into the abyss, but time is running out. Because “America First” doesn’t just mean America losing its place in the world, but losing its soul.
