Eileen Gu Is An Indictment Of Our Entire Immigration Orthodoxy
The Federalist article by Elle Purnell argues that Eileen Gu’s success story reveals a counterfeit American dream shaped by post-national, neoliberal values. It recounts Yan Gu’s immigration from China in the 1980s, her elite education, and Eileen Gu’s privileged upbringing in the Bay Area. The piece notes Gu’s decision too compete for China at the Beijing Olympics and asserts that she has received millions of dollars from the Chinese government,framing her as a propaganda asset for Beijing and a symbol of loyalty to China rather than to the United States. it highlights Gu’s public statements about pride in both her heritage and American upbringing,suggesting her loyalty is primarily Chinese. The article also references a viral TikTok video and other commentary to illustrate broader anti-immigration and anti-establishment sentiments among some audiences. It argues that Gu’s case exemplifies a broader trend in which immigration and globalization are leveraged to advance economic interests and corporate power, rather than a customary American national project. By contrasting this with a view of American citizenship grounded in virtue and self-government, the piece contends that Gu represents a failed American and a betrayal of the nation’s deeper ideals.
If Eileen Gu’s mother came to America for a better life, she got it. Yan Gu, the daughter of two Chinese government officials, emigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s, just a few decades after the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, which overhauled immigration policies and prompted a massive increase in arrivals from Asia and Latin America. Educated at Auburn University, Rockefeller University, and eventually Stanford Graduate School of Business, she dabbled as a ski instructor and, apparently, in venture capital.
In 2003, she gave birth to a daughter in San Francisco, raising her in an affluent Bay Area neighborhood. What’s known of Eileen Gu’s childhood reads like a caricature of coastal elitism: skiing in Lake Tahoe at age three, educated at a girls’ school where this year’s tuition costs are upwards of $48,000 per year, presented at Le Bal des débutantes in Paris, groomed for Olympic stardom, and now studying at Stanford, modeling, skiing in the Olympics, and juggling multimillion-dollar brand deals.
Her story would be elevated as a saccharine picture of the neoliberal American dream, if Gu hadn’t decided to ski for China. In 2019, she announced her intent to compete for the People’s Republic of China at the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Since then, she has received millions of dollars from the Chinese Communist Party government, according to The Wall Street Journal, and has become one of the biggest propaganda tools in the arsenal of the United States’ biggest adversary.
“I am proud of my heritage, and equally proud of my American upbringings,” she wrote on Instagram announcing her defection. For Gu, her heritage — her loyalty — is Chinese. America was an “upbringing,” a red-white-and-blue finishing school that opened all the right doors but does not elicit national allegiance or anything, really, on her part.
It’s the same sentiment expressed in a TikTok video floating around by Montse Lewin, a self-described “digital creator” whose family is from Mexico and whose Instagram is full of extravagant travel and wedding photos.
“We do not move to America because we think it’s a better country,” she says, in a video viewed more than 91,000 times on TikTok. “You’re stupid to think that we move to this country for some hot dogs and some baseball. We have better vibes, music, food, culture, history, literally all of the above. We just move here because we are looking to make more money. …”
(She also says she hopes any Americans who support our immigration law enforcement will “rot in hell.”)
@montselewin ICE destroys families. And some of you still sleep peacefully knowing you voted for the man who made it worse. Don’t pretend you care about Latinos now. We won’t forget. We won’t stay quiet. Fuck ICE. We’ll keep showing up for each other, because no one else will.
Mercenary as it is, that’s precisely the counterfeit American dream that’s been sold to aliens and Americans alike by the powers that oversaw the biggest influx of foreigners into America in history.
In 2017, the George W. Bush Institute published an essay by Bush’s Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, titled “Immigrants Put America First: In Coming Here, They Affirm Our Values.”
“Immigrants enter the United States with dreams of a better life for themselves and their families,” he wrote. That much is true: From poor and desperate workers from the Global South to privileged arrivals like Yan Gu, everyone wants to enjoy the money, comfort, and freedom available in America. Every Somali migrant raking in fraudulent welfare checks in Minnesota is enjoying a “better life” on the American taxpayer’s dime, as are immigrant families back in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador, where remittances from America make up a quarter of each country’s entire GDP.
Gutierrez says this desire to profit from American wealth and opportunity is proof that immigrants “put America first” and “reinforce and enrich the values that make America the country it is.”
If that were true — if the “values that make America” were economic self-enrichment and desire for a “better life” — then Eileen Gu would be a model citizen. She embodies all the virtues of the post-national “elite” who view America as a land of economic opportunity and nothing else, an office park where hundreds of thousands of American jobs are happily handed over to H-1B visa holders in the name of Gross Domestic Product.
As The Spectator’s Melissa Chen put it, Gu “reinforces the transactional ethos of neoliberal globalism: that all people, cultures, and allegiances are fluid, unbound by borders or heritage. Davos Man prioritizes economic opportunities, and universal values like individualism or multiculturalism above ALL else.”
To this crowd, Gu is actually a success story. Perhaps that’s why the corporate press is fawning over her despite her allegiance to an American adversary. She’s the embodiment of the America they promote: an economic zone where citizens of the world can enrich themselves with zero loyalties attached. As Mike Pence put it, “cheap goods are a big part of” the American dream.
But if you understand that the American dream is not about economic enrichment, but rather the freedom to live virtuously and to secure that freedom for posterity by participating in self-government, you understand that Eileen Gu is a failed American and a traitor. Being born in San Francisco did not make her American, in any meaningful sense, any more than wanting to earn more money or being tired, poor, and huddled turns masses of economic migrants into Americans.
America is a heritage descended from the greatest civilizations of the world, refined on the frontier, and dedicated to man’s freedom to dutifully live as he ought. She has gladly welcomed many who seek the same goal — like the family of Alysa Liu, an American Olympic figure skater whose father fled the same country Gu represents. But wanting to enrich yourself doesn’t make you an American, and it’s time to stop humoring the pretense that it does. The proof is in the person of Eileen Gu.
Elle Purnell is the assignment editor at The Federalist. She has appeared on Fox Business and Newsmax, and her work has been featured by RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.
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