Why the World Is Rethinking America: The Country That Forgot Why Talent Came
The world is rethinking America.
Not loudly. Not angrily. But deliberately.
In counseling offices in Delhi and Dubai. In family WhatsApp threads in Lagos and Lima. In spreadsheet comparisons that didn’t exist ten years ago. In the pause before a student clicks “apply.”
I know this because I have been watching these decisions being made, year after year, across continents.
And because what I’m seeing now has forced me to revisit the assumptions I carried when I stood on the other side of that decision myself.
I didn’t come to America with certainty.
I came with belief.
Belief that this country stood for something larger than bloodlines and birthplace. That effort mattered more than origin. That if you were willing to work, adapt, and build, America would offer a fair process – even if it couldn’t promise an easy outcome.
No one promised safety as comfort.
No one promised belonging as entitlement.
But the message that traveled across borders was unmistakable:
Merit mattered here – and it would be protected by systems.
That belief didn’t come from politicians or policy documents. It came from stories. From teachers. From relatives. From the way America was spoken about – not as paradise, but as possibility. A flawed country, yes, but one governed by rules, due process, and institutional restraint.
That belief was strong enough to pull an eighteen-year-old across the world, into uncertainty, into a future he could not yet imagine.
If I were eighteen today, I probably would not make the same choice.
Not because America has become uniquely dangerous.
But because it has become uniquely unpredictable – and is now displaying that unpredictability in full view of the world.
What Talent Actually Came For
I didn’t come to America for ease.
I came for meritocracy – not the motivational-poster version, but the hard, procedural kind where competence has a fighting chance over time.
I came for the radical idea that competence could outrun origin within guardrails. That while the system was imperfect, it was procedural – boring, rules-obsessed, appeal-friendly. That power would be constrained by process, and that over time, emotion would give way to law.
That constraint – not comfort – was the promise.
That dull machinery of due process was the real American innovation.
Merit without that machinery is not opportunity.
It’s exposure.
And that is the quiet recalculation now underway.
There has always been risk in crossing borders. Students who move across the world have never been risk-averse.
What has changed is not the existence of risk, but its presentation.
America is now performing its risk in multiple dimensions at once – culturally, legally, socially, and institutionally – and broadcasting it in 4K.
For global families, the question is no longer Is America perfect?
It is far more practical:
When things go wrong, does the system behave predictably – or does it fracture?
When the Signal Changes, the World Listens
Which brings us to a sentence that traveled far beyond the room in which it was spoken.
“In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”
When J.D. Vance said this to a friendly crowd, it wasn’t policy. It was posture. A reassurance aimed inward.
But international students don’t parse American culture wars the way Americans do. They don’t decode applause lines. They read signal.
And the signal that travels globally is not nuance – it’s implication.
Is this still a country confident enough to judge effort on merit?
Or one increasingly preoccupied with identity anxiety and grievance management?
That distinction matters more abroad than we seem willing to admit – because it speaks directly to whether institutions are still governed by process or by mood.
From Prudence to Contraction
Now layer in institutional behavior.
When Purdue University signals discomfort enrolling Chinese graduate students, the language is careful. Risk management. National interest. Prudence.
These concerns are not imaginary.
But here is the question almost no one wants to answer:
What replaces that talent?
A meritocratic system does not simply exclude. It substitutes. It invests. It expands domestic capacity.
We are not doing that.
We are narrowing access without widening preparation.
Reducing inflow without strengthening throughput.
That is not strategy.
That is contraction dressed up as vigilance.
Globally, it reads not as strength – but as uncertainty about our own systems.
Who Is Still Carrying American Excellence
This is why a single image from a global academic competition matters.
At the World Expo on Synthetic Biology, an American high school team placed tenth. Respectable. But look closely at who carried that result (see pic).
This is not about grievance.
It is about data.
America’s most competitive outcomes are still disproportionately driven by students whose families bought into the meritocratic promise with almost religious intensity – often immigrants, often first- or second-generation, often the very populations now being rhetorically and administratively deprioritized.
Here is the contradiction at the heart of the moment:
America still runs on merit, while talking like it doesn’t need it.
And this is where the conversation usually stops – too early.
International talent has never been marginal to American success. It has been foundational infrastructure. It staffs research labs, sustains graduate programs, fuels patents and startups, replenishes faculty pipelines, and anchors America’s scientific and technological leadership.
When America stops being the default destination for global ambition, the effects are not immediate.
They compound.
Minneapolis and the Cost of Illusion
And then incidents like the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good – a 37-year-old mother, poet, and wife, killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis – occur.
Not as anomalies.
As stress tests.
From abroad, these moments are not read as isolated failures. They do not create fear from scratch. They confirm an emerging perception – that institutional restraint weakens when pressure rises, and that outcomes feel increasingly discretionary rather than procedural.
The concern is not that enforcement exists.
It is that enforcement appears uneven, politicized, and insulated from transparent review.
This is where the illusion breaks.
America did not just sell opportunity.
It sold protection under law – personal, procedural, and intellectual.
When that protection feels conditional, the calculation changes fast.
Not Is America great?
But Is the risk still worth the reward?
Increasingly, for many families, the answer is no – not because America lacks excellence, but because credible alternatives now exist at scale.
This is not a boycott.
It is not outrage.
It is reallocation.
The Ethical Failure of Higher Education
This is where universities must stop pretending innocence.
We demand absolute truthfulness from 17-year-olds. We threaten rescinded offers for misrepresentation. We lecture them on integrity and character.
Then we turn around and sell a curated fantasy.
Glossy brochures. Sanitized narratives. Aspirational language that omits volatility, constraint, and institutional fragility.
That asymmetry is no longer naive.
It is unethical.
Honesty may reduce applications in the short term. But withholding material truth in a high-risk, life-altering decision destroys trust – and trust, once lost, does not return on reputation alone.
Loss is real. Institutions may have to learn to live with it.
Because the alternative is worse: enrolling students under illusion, then watching belief collapse when reality arrives unannounced.
Why This Moment Actually Matters
I probably would not choose America today as an eighteen-year-old. That is not rejection. It is diagnosis.
And I say it because I still believe this country can course-correct.
But talent will not wait.
When students re-prioritize destinations, when counselors quietly shift recommendations, when families diversify risk, pipelines do not pause – they re-root. Networks form elsewhere. Alumni gravity follows. Innovation compounds in new places.
Once that happens, talent does not rush back.
America’s global position does not collapse in a headline moment. It diminishes through quiet substitution.
Universities cannot remain neutral while this happens. And the country cannot rely on nostalgia to reverse it.
Meritocracy is not self-sustaining.
Openness is not automatic.
And confidence is not performative.
America can still be the place ambitious students choose first.
But only if it remembers why they came in the first place – and rebuilds the systems that made belief rational.
Confidence built this country, not comfort.
And predictability – not illusion – is the price of remaining indispensable.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
