Is “USA! USA! USA!” a more fundamentally obnoxious chant than “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!”? As an Australian who has spent most of the last 15 years living in the United States and is now a permanent resident, the Socceroos’ World Cup group match against the USA raises some questions. Has my adopted nation dethroned my homeland as the world’s foremost exponent of being unconscionably terrible to immigrants? And on a more personal level … who do I support here?
Well, look, OK, there’s really only one answer to that second question. I’m not an especially patriotic type, but if anything does bring out my Australian-ness, it’s the World Cup – perhaps because it’s one of the few events at which we can still claim to be underdogs. And now, two decades after I rose at dawn to watch Australia’s dreams dashed by the intersection of Lucas Neill’s leg and Fabio Grosso’s general vicinity, I find myself living in a country hosting the tournament.
Not so long ago, the idea of seeing the Socceroos play on the biggest stage of all would have had me racing to book tickets. But not this year. For a start there’s the cost – the astonishingly high ticket prices, accompanied by transport costs that feel actively predatory. But more generally, there’s a strange and somewhat fraught atmosphere around this tournament, one that reflects the mood of the country as a whole. With every passing day the US feels less like the land of the free and more like the home of the brave, and the World Cup is on a collision course with one of the primary reasons for this: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
While the war in Iran has pushed it from the front pages internationally, ICE continues to wage its own domestic war against undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants and anyone else its officers decide they don’t like the look of. Football in the US remains popular in immigrant communities, which means that the World Cup is shaping up as a potential flashpoint. There is uncertainty around ICE’s involvement with the World Cup, and whether or not ICE does target games, the fact that it is a possibility is bad enough. Living in the US today as a non-citizen is characterised by a constant low-level wariness, a sense of walking on thin ice.
Similarly, the last two years have made it clear that the US is not particularly friendly to visitors: no one wants to get off a long flight to find themselves arguing the finer points of immigration law with a man who has just called you “retarded” and explained that, “Trump is back in town … we’re doing things the way we should have always been doing them.” It’s no surprise, then, that tourist numbers have declined dramatically since Donald Trump’s return to power – and despite the confident proclamations from the US president and Fifa boss Gianni Infantino, there’s no reason to believe that the World Cup should be immune to this effect. It’s not like anyone is going out of their way to make fans feel welcome.
So if there was ever a time to find one of those silly hats with corks on it and brush up on the words to Boonie’s victory song, surely this is it? Right? Well, perhaps. But nationalism admits little in the way of nuance at the best of times, and these are certainly not the best of times. National identity is one thing – a shared origin implies a shared context, a shared understanding, a shared body of cultural experience. Try explaining TISM to an American and it’ll become very clear how different two ostensibly similar countries can be. It’s why I could slide seamlessly back into Melbourne after a decade away, and why I could live in the US for the rest of my life and never consider myself truly American.
But it’s a fine line between celebration of similarity and fear of difference, and it has always seemed to me that national pride sits uneasily on both sides of that line. It’s the place where the warmth of kinship starts to metastasise into derision for the other, where “us” starts to be defined in opposition to “them”.
It’s also hard to take the moral high ground about the Trump administration’s blatant and cynical scapegoating of immigrants when Australia served as a primary source of inspiration. It’s hard to look at the US’s blithe disregard for the climate crisis without thinking about how Australia remains the world’s biggest exporter of gas. It’s hard to condemn the US’s regional meddling when Australia has its own ignominious history of dealing with its neighbours in a manner that Gareth Liddiard described as “conducting policy with the one free hand while the other’s around their throat.” And so on.
I feel lucky to have an Australian passport, sure. It confers privileges denied to the vast majority of the world’s population, and the fact that they’re afforded to me is simply a matter of luck. And I’m grateful. But proud? To the extent I’m proud of either of my countries, it’s because of what they do, not what they claim to be – and at this point, it’s hard to feel like cheering for either of them.
