The American dream is changing

This year marks exactly ten years since I first set foot on American soil as a young graduate student at Columbia. At the time, among my fellow international students and classmates, I had been a rank outlier for one key reason: I’d had no intention back then of immigrating or settling down in the United States.

And so, while many of my classmates stayed back in the US after graduation to pursue further study and work opportunities, I left the country, travelled the Middle East, and later briefly resettled in India. Today, I’m an outlier for a very different reason: While many of my Indian classmates and friends from Columbia have left the US, I’m back in the country – this time as a proper immigrant based in Washington.

Many people are following not my lead but that of my friends. The enrolment of international students in US universities has fallen by 17% compared to a year ago. The number of people entering the H1-B visa lottery has fallen by more than 20%. Some estimates claim that in 2025, more people migrated out of the US than moved in – the first time that has happened in at least 50 years.

For decades, many people from across the developing world have striven to immigrate to the US to pursue their economic dreams. But truth be told, that logic is weakening.

If you’re financially successful, the US is still the place to be: average salaries are much higher than anywhere else in the world; business ideas grow to become multi-billion-dollar enterprises more frequently than elsewhere.

But the entryway to those goals is getting harder. Student and work visas are being denied at higher rates than before. Young college graduates are facing historic levels of unemployment, thanks to AI. Housing is prohibitively expensive. So, why did I choose to return to the US while others left? For one, I serendipitously found a faster path to permanent residence than most of my Indian friends.

But second, and more importantly, in spending time outside America, I began to slowly appreciate American values. I spent the last few years watching India change in ways which impacted my sense of identity and belonging in the country. I came to America looking to rediscover that belonging.

It turns out that I’m not alone in thinking that way. Yes, America is currently in the throes of an anti-immigrant backlash of historic proportions. But communal peace and social freedoms have deteriorated so badly elsewhere in the world – especially across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East – that many are now fleeing to the US as intellectual and cultural refugees. A relative from Delhi vows never to move back to India because she fears for her safety there as a woman. My wife misses her family but wishes Indian society afforded the same freedoms to ambitious young women as America.

All this means that for a new wave of American immigrants, the primary allure of the American dream is increasingly turning from economic to social and political. This is perhaps part of why many international students and young immigrants become politically activistic: they come to America hoping to express the political dissent that they are not allowed in their home countries. Think of how the Gaza campus protests were primarily led by foreign students, for instance.

This also means that diaspora communities are subtly changing how they assimilate into mainstream American society. In previous generations, immigrants tended to be fiercely protective of their own culture at home but non-expressive outside: they would force-feed their kids Bharatanatyam lessons while keeping their cultural identity low-profile at work. A young man, born in Virginia to Tamil parents, told me that his parents always had Tamil television running at home.

Today, a globalised generation is more comfortable holding multiple cultural identities at the same time. They go to temples and wear hijabs in public, but are also content to spend their Sunday evenings at a baseball game with their friends. They binge on American shows and movies but also don’t shy away from hosting Bollywood-themed parties at work.

All that they want is the freedom to be themselves, everywhere and at all times, and that’s what they’re hoping America will give them.

Mohamed Zeeshan is a student of all things global and, self-confessedly, master of none, notwithstanding his Columbia Master’s, a stint with the UN and with monarchs in the Middle East.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH)