“America First” is a strain of thinking that goes back a long way. The slogan first appeared in the 1850s but gained prominence in 1916 when President Woodrow Wilson pledged to keep the US neutral in World War I.
In the 1920s, “America First” helped Warren G. Harding get elected President, became the rallying cry of the Klu Klux Klan, and was the impetus for passage of the Immigration Act of 1924 (also known as the National Origins Act or the Johnson-Reed Act), which established America’s quota system based on race and nationality.
Then in the 1930s and early 1940s, “America First” was reprised, this time by Charles Lindbergh, the famous American pilot who led the “America First Committee” – a group of some 800,000 paying members in 45 chapters who wanted to keep the country out of World War II. Decades later, conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan trotted out the “America First” theme again, this time to announce an immigration policy that would become the centerpiece of his presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996. While Buchanan never came close to winning the Republican nomination, his “America First” platform was successful in transforming White anxiety about an increasingly diverse society into an organizing principle for the conservative movement.
That takes us to today when “America First” policies are the hallmark of the Republican party, including plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and implement a foreign policy where America stands alone on many key global issues. If this sounds like a good idea, look no farther than the United Kingdom and Brexit to understand the disastrous consequences.
Going back to the 1970s when the UK voted to join the European Economic Community,
the precursor to the European Union (EU), most UK citizens were high on the decision to be a part of Europe – 67 percent voted “yes” in the UK’s first nationwide referendum in 1975. When the EU was formally established in 1993, the UK carved out a separate role from other EU countries, including keeping the pound sterling as its currency, and the positives of being in the EU remained the common view. And there was reason for this assessment. The UK was the leader among the 27 countries in the EU in economic growth as measured by gross domestic product, unemployment and superior debt and currency valuations.
Even so, suspicions that the EU bureaucracy was inefficient and intrusive began to infect the public and were exaggerated by scare headlines in the British tabloids. And then the Great Recession hit the UK in 2008, followed by a eurozone crisis and the Arab Spring in 2010, which produced economic uncertainty and waves of immigration to Europe and the UK that set the stage for Brexit. In 2016 alone, immigration to Britain reached 650,000, fueled by European migrants coming to work in “the jobs factory of Europe.”
Thus, when Britian’s Prime Minister David Cameron agreed to hold a referendum on whether the UK should leave the EU, a new Brexit Party headed by Nigel Farage mounted an aggressive anti-immigrant “leave” campaign where billboards showed throngs of mostly non-white men flooding the country. Farage and his followers promised better trade deals, more jobs for British citizens, more money for domestic programs like the National Health Service, and a better economy for the UK. And this is what 17.4 million Britons – the 52 percent who voted for Brexit in the referendum on June 23, 2016 – expected to happen.
But by almost every economic measure, parting ways with the EU proved disastrous and the shock was immediate. Minutes after the Brexit vote became public, the pound plummeted a record 8.05 percent to a 31-year-low against the dollar and by the end of the week, the pound depreciated almost 13 percent, a level that remains unequaled as a UK foreign-exchange debacle.
Moreover, the UK economy continues to shrink in the aftermath of Brexit. As documented in a 2024 report by Cambridge Econometrics, the UK economy shrunk since the Brexit vote by 140 billion pounds due to new trade barriers, stifled employment growth, and a significant drop in business confidence in the UK and its industries. This has translated into 2 million fewer jobs, including almost 300,000 fewer jobs in the capital and a loss of personal incomes of 2,000 pounds generally in the year 2023 and 3,400 pounds for the average Londoner. However, the worse news is still to come. According to the report, by 2035, more than 300 billion pounds are set to be wiped off the value of the UK’s economy and the value of London’s economy will shrink by more than 60 billion pounds.
It is rare that voters have a chance to envision the future by understanding what is already occurring elsewhere. “America First” is not the answer to prosperity. It is about rejecting a sense of America as a participant in a dynamic, diverse world; erecting barriers; and putting protectionism and isolation ahead of economic progress.