标签： North America

As the United States marks its 250th year of independence, a massive, heavily hyped Fourth of July celebration spearheaded by former President Donald Trump on Washington DC’s National Mall is poised to kick off Saturday – but the event has become tangled in political conflict, overshadowed by severe weather forecasts, and met with widespread public ambivalence, with many Americans simply noting “it could be worse” when assessing the current state of the nation.

Organized through a public-private partnership backed by the White House, the event, officially branded as Salute to America 250 Celebrations & Fireworks, is billed by Trump as a “spectacular rally” intended to make history. The centerpiece of the day’s programming is a record-breaking fireworks display that organizers hope will claim the Guinness World Record for the largest official fireworks show ever hosted. To hit that mark, roughly 850,000 fireworks will be launched from 10 locations across DC, including eight barges anchored along the Potomac River, for a 40-minute show – double the length of the city’s standard annual display, which typically uses just 20,000 fireworks. The current record has been held since 2016 by a megachurch event in the Philippines.

Adding to the fanfare, military aircraft will conduct hourly flyovers over the nation’s capital starting at 1:15 PM local time and continuing through sunset, with Trump’s newly updated Air Force One set to feature in one of the ceremonial formations. Trump has also teased that he will deliver a “really long speech” at the event, scheduled to begin at roughly 9:45 PM, as a playful demonstration “to show that I can do anything.”

But for all the planned spectacle, the event has faced persistent headwinds on multiple fronts. First, extreme summer heat has already forced the cancellation of all earlier Saturday programming planned for the National Mall, with forecast temperatures set to hit a sweltering 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit). The late start time for the main event, combined with the extreme heat and humidity, is expected to keep crowd sizes lower than organizers initially hoped, and even administration insiders have privately expressed concern about turnout. Forecasts also warn of possible evening thunderstorms that could derail proceedings entirely. Adding to public health concerns, internal documents obtained by the Washington Post and Politico from the National Park Service warn that the massive fireworks display could produce “very unhealthy” air pollution in downtown Washington DC, raising fears of respiratory risks for attendees.

Beyond weather and public health concerns, the event has become mired in political controversy. Critics have accused Trump of deliberately politicizing the nonpartisan national anniversary to advance his own political agenda. In the weeks since the rally was announced, multiple scheduled musical performers have dropped out of the lineup in protest. Critics also argue that the White House-organized Freedom250 committee, which is overseeing the event, has effectively pushed aside America250, a bipartisan congressional commission created a decade ago specifically to plan the 250th anniversary celebrations.

“President Trump couldn’t help but try making America’s 250th birthday all about himself,” California Democratic Senator Alex Padilla said during a June 24 hearing on the event. Organizers have pushed back hard against these claims, dismissing them as a “partisan smear” by opposition politicians seeking to gain political advantage rather than celebrate the historic national milestone.

While Trump’s DC rally draws the most national attention, celebrations are unfolding across the country to mark the 250th anniversary. In New York City’s Times Square, the iconic New Year’s Eve ball will drop eight times over the course of the day to mark midnight across every U.S. time zone, with a local fireworks display scheduled for 9:25 PM. In Philadelphia, the birthplace of American independence where the Declaration of Independence was signed 250 years ago, a star-studded celebration concert featuring headliners Christina Aguilera and Meek Mill is planned, and the city will also host its final match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup earlier in the day.

Against the backdrop of these celebrations, public sentiment across the country remains muted, with many Americans taking a measured, ambivalent view of the state of the nation in its 250th year, summed up by the common refrain: it could be worse.

Two and a half centuries have passed since the United States formally severed political ties with Great Britain to declare its independence. In that time, the young, scattered collection of Atlantic coastal settlements has evolved beyond all recognition into a transcontinental global superpower, but the core cultural and political fractures that marked its earliest days remain embedded in the fabric of modern American life, reshaping contemporary politics from immigration policy to territorial ambition.

When the first 13 colonies secured independence, their combined territory stretched across just 430,000 square miles (1.1 million square kilometers). Today, that geographic footprint has expanded eightfold to roughly 3.7 million square miles. Population growth has followed an even more staggering trajectory: the 1790 national census counted just 4 million residents (including enslaved people), while the 2025 population estimate puts the total at 343 million – an 8,475% increase over two centuries.

Even as the nation’s physical and demographic size have exploded, historians trace modern political fault lines directly to the cultural identities that formed in the nation’s earliest years, a split that continues to define the presidency of Donald Trump. Key pledges of his agenda – from strict curbs on immigration to renewed calls for territorial expansion – echo the divisions that existed from the founding era, when heated disagreements over slavery, constitutional governance, and economic systems left the new nation deeply fractured. As Boston College history professor and prominent Substack author Heather Cox Richardson notes, 18th century observers widely predicted the fragile new experiment would collapse on its own: “All we need to do is stay over here and wait till they tear themselves apart and go back and pick them up,” she summarizes the contemporary perspective.

Colin Woodard, director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University, maps these early divides into distinct regional identities that still shape American politics today. The first, what Woodard terms “Yankeeland” across the northern U.S., traces its roots to Puritan settlers fleeing religious persecution in Europe, later reinforced by German and Scandinavian arrivals who cemented a pluralistic cultural outlook. In contrast, the broad mid-continental band of Greater Appalachia was first settled by independent-minded Scots-Irish migrants, whose experience of English oppression left them deeply suspicious of centralized state power. “For them, freedom means maximising the autonomy and freedom of the individual and any growth in the power of government axiomatically means individuals are less free,” Woodard explains, a philosophy directly opposed to Yankee New England’s more communitarian outlook. Further south, the Deep South developed into an oligarchic, hierarchical society built around a landowning elite, many of whom brought the system of chattel slavery with them from Caribbean plantations.

The young nation nearly doubled in size overnight with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France, and by the 1820s, territorial expansion had pushed the U.S. border all the way to the Pacific Coast via the Oregon Country acquisition. This westward push was ideologically fueled by the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny,” the widespread belief that the U.S. was divinely ordained to expand across the entire North American continent and beyond. This expansion brought competing regional cultures into new conflict: the harsh interior West mirrored Appalachia’s rugged wilderness and attracted similarly individualist settlers, while the Pacific Coast became a battleground between those values and the commercial, more government-friendly culture of transplants from the Northeast.

These same divides are clearly visible on today’s presidential electoral map. The U.S. Northeast and West Coast remain strongholds of liberal politics, broadly supportive of expanded government involvement in social and economic life, while the South, stretching from Texas to Florida, and the interior West have become the backbone of modern Republican conservatism.

By the end of the 19th century, large-scale territorial expansion had come to a halt, but demographic growth continued to accelerate, driven almost entirely by successive waves of immigration. “One of the things that really is at the center of the United States of America is immigration,” Richardson says. “The one thing that does link us all is that concept that we can make a future that we want.”

The first major immigration wave ran from the 1840s to 1889, bringing 14 million primarily northern and western European arrivals to U.S. shores. A second wave from 1890 to the 1920s brought more than 18 million migrants from southern and eastern Europe, and each new influx sparked a fierce nativist backlash, as established residents worried new arrivals would undercut wages and erode existing cultural norms. Restrictive policies soon followed: the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barred all immigration from China, and the 1924 Immigration Act imposed strict national origin quotas that cut overall immigration dramatically enough to create a clear, lasting dip in annual U.S. population growth.

It was not until the 1960s that these restrictive quotas were lifted, opening the door to the current immigration wave that has reshaped American demography. Since that reform, more than 70 million new immigrants have settled in the U.S., the vast majority from Asia and Latin America, including roughly 18 million from Mexico alone. Data from the Migration Policy Institute shows that by 2024, foreign-born residents made up 14.8% of the U.S. population, matching the all-time historical peak set in 1890, and immigration accounts for 84% of all current U.S. population growth.

Historically, early 19th and 20th century immigration waves – driven by industrial expansion in the northern states – shifted national political power toward the North. This geographic imbalance intensified sectional tensions: Southern political leaders pushed for continued territorial expansion to add new slave-holding states and maintain their national influence, a conflict that ultimately led to Southern secession and the American Civil War.

Modern demographic shifts have reversed this historical pattern. Today, large numbers of immigrants and transplants from northern states are relocating to the South, drawn by booming urban economies in Texas and Florida. At the same time, the ongoing crisis of unauthorized migration across the U.S. southern border has stoked widespread cultural and political anxiety, creating the conditions for the resurgence of populist conservatism embodied by Donald Trump’s second presidency.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has moved quickly to fulfill his campaign promise of mass deportations of undocumented migrants. He has also openly embraced a nostalgia for 19th century territorial expansion, floating proposals to acquire Greenland, repatriate control of the Panama Canal from Panama, and even annex Canada and Venezuela as new U.S. states. This agenda marks a sharp reversal of the last century of American history: for 150 years after the end of continental expansion, the U.S. shifted focus from growing its territory to gradually opening its borders to broader immigration. Today, Trump has flipped this script, prioritizing new territorial gains while sharply restricting entry to new arrivals.

Trump and his supporters argue that mass immigration threatens to permanently alter the fundamental character of the American nation, with the former president frequently warning, “We won’t have a country anymore” if current policies continue. Woodard argues this anxiety is not a new, modern phenomenon – it is the latest iteration of a 250-year-old core debate over what it means to be American. “That does not come out of nowhere,” he says. “We have the meta struggle in American history: Are we a civic nation devoted to … a society where every individual human can be equally, universally and sustainably free over time? Or is this a state that belongs to a certain group of people that are the real Americans by blood and descent?”

In the scope of human history, 250 years is a fleeting moment, barely a blip on the timeline of global civilizations. But for the United States, two and a half centuries have brought transformation unlike almost any other nation on Earth. Even so, the deep-rooted divisions at the nation’s core and the persistent anxiety over its future have remained a constant through every era of growth and change.

In a landmark decision that reaffirms a core constitutional principle, the U.S. Supreme Court has once again ruled that the 14th Amendment guarantees automatic birthright citizenship to all individuals born on U.S. soil — including the children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visa holders, a group the second Trump administration had pushed to exclude from this long-standing legal protection.

The ruling immediately sparked fierce and intemperate backlash from far-right commentators, illustrating just how central anti-immigration activism has become to the identity of the modern American political right. The Federalist’s Sean Davis went so far as to suggest extreme, unhinged measures including dissolving the Union and forcibly sterilizing foreign visitors to the U.S., while prominent right-wing voice Matt Walsh issued hysterical claims that the ruling had destroyed the America he grew up in — a nation that already had birthright citizenship and high levels of unauthorized immigration during his childhood.

These over-the-top outbursts, while alarming, are characteristic of modern social media-fueled political discourse. They also lay bare the evolution of nativism on the right: what began as a policy issue has solidified into a closed, all-consuming ideological worldview that is resistant to reasoned debate, empirical data, or compromise. Today, the idea that immigration is an “invasion” designed to displace the country’s founding population has become a foundational belief for the American right, comparable in its cultural and political centrality to anti-racism for 2010s progressives and pro-Palestine activism for 2020s left-wing movements.

Crucially, however, this hardline nativist worldview represents a clear minority position in the United States, according to consistent public opinion data. Gallup polling confirms that an overwhelming majority of Americans still believe immigration, on balance, benefits the country. This is not to say the public supports open borders: sentiment against unauthorized immigration and in favor of strengthened border security remains widespread, and voter backlash against the chaotic, unrestricted quasi-legal immigration of the first Biden administration directly contributed to Trump’s 2024 election victory. Even so, most Americans do not view unauthorized immigration as an existential invasion, and broad support for a pathway to citizenship for long-term undocumented residents remains strong — even among many non-MAGA Republicans.

On the specific question of birthright citizenship, multiple polls echo the majority support for retaining the policy. A Quinnipiac University poll conducted ahead of the SCOTUS ruling found that 69% of registered voters believe the court should uphold the 1898 precedent reaffirming 14th Amendment birthright citizenship, with just 27% supporting reversal. Pew Research Center data does show that roughly half of Americans favor denying birthright citizenship specifically to children of undocumented immigrants, though pollsters rarely break out public opinion on children of temporary visa holders, leaving majority views on that specific subgroup unclear.

This split in public opinion actually creates an opening for pragmatic policy change: a targeted effort to revise birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants could eventually build enough public support to pass a constitutional amendment, if hardliners were willing to pursue a majoritarian, compromise-driven strategy. But that path is largely off the table for today’s MAGA movement, which has turned immigration into a maximalist culture war issue. Taking an extreme position on immigration has become a core loyalty test for the movement; willingness to compromise to achieve tangible policy gains is seen as a sign of being an outsider, rather than a committed member of the movement.

On the Democratic side, political strategy is also being driven by reaction to MAGA, rather than coherent, long-term policy planning. On one hand, this has led even prominent left-wing voices to pivot unexpectedly after the SCOTUS ruling: progressive streamer Hasan Piker set aside his usual anti-American rhetoric to celebrate the ruling as a defeat for a fundamentally harmful change that would have upended more than a century of constitutional precedent. On the other hand, this purely reactive approach has made it nearly impossible to pass stable, sensible immigration policy. Because Trump and conservatives push for tighter restrictions, Democrats default to pushing for looser borders in response. This dynamic, the analysis argues, explains why the Biden administration took such a lax approach to border enforcement during its first term — a mistake that ultimately cleared the way for Trump’s return to the White House.

This lack of smart, bipartisan immigration strategy comes at a critical moment for the United States, which is now facing a growing fertility crisis that mirrors demographic trends across the globe. Two decades ago, U.S. fertility rates were high enough to keep the population stable long-term. Today, U.S. fertility has fallen below the rate Japan recorded in the 1980s, putting America on the same path of rapid population aging and shrinking that has defined Japan’s economy for decades. Without increased immigration, this demographic shift will have severe economic and social consequences: over the next 25 years, the ratio of working-age Americans per retiree will drop from 3-to-1 to 2-to-1, forcing higher taxes for working-age people to fund elder care, increasing the personal care burden for adults supporting aging parents, and dragging down economic growth and living standards for younger generations. As economist Paul Krugman has noted, immigrants are disproportionately represented in the elder care workforce, making immigration a direct solution to the coming care crisis. The burden of supporting a growing retired population is also likely to push fertility rates even lower, compounding the problem over time, with rural and small-town America hit hardest by population decline.

Immigration cannot permanently stop population aging in a low-fertility world — immigrants also age over time, and global population shrinkage will eventually reduce the global supply of immigrants. But U.S. economic strength and its long-standing global reputation as a destination for opportunity give the country a window to slow demographic decline and buy time to address the root causes of low fertility.

To maximize the benefits of immigration, the U.S. needs to design policy that aligns with both public opinion and economic reality. Fiscal data shows that college-educated immigrants generate a net positive contribution to public finances, reducing long-term national debt, while lower-educated immigrants create a net fiscal drain in the short term — a gap that narrows when accounting for upward mobility of second-generation descendants, but still remains significant. That means a policy of prioritizing skilled legal immigration, strengthening border security, and reducing unvetted quasi-legal asylum grants matches what most American voters say they want, while delivering the greatest economic benefit to the country.

It is legitimate to acknowledge that immigration is not just an economic issue, but a cultural one: assimilation is a two-way street, and immigrants reshape the culture of the countries they join, just as they adapt to it. For those who prioritize preserving the exact cultural character of the U.S. they grew up in, restricting immigration is a logically consistent position, and all nation-states retain the sovereign right to close their borders to preserve their cultural identity if they choose. But that position has already lost the argument in American public opinion: with 79% of the public saying immigration is good for the country overall, even with the understanding that it will bring long-term cultural change, the cultural preservation argument is a lost cause, regardless of how loudly its proponents shout and threaten.

For Democrats, the takeaway is clear: embracing open borders purely as a reaction to MAGA nativism is a political and policy mistake. Most Americans do not support unrestricted immigration; they favor legal entry of immigrants who can contribute positively to the national economy. If Democrats continue to respond to conservative election wins by loosening border controls and ignoring unauthorized immigration, voters will continue to elect xenophobic populists in response.

In an era of persistently low fertility, the United States desperately needs a thoughtful, pragmatic approach to immigration that puts national interest ahead of culture war posturing. It cannot afford to let a small, loud fringe of ideological activists dictate its long-term national demographic and economic policy.