For someone who has spent most of the last 15 years as a permanent resident of the United States, the arrival of the World Cup presents an unexpected crisis of conscience. The Socceroos' group match against the USA should have been an easy call. Instead, it has become a question without a satisfying answer.
The surface-level obstacles are straightforward enough. Ticket prices have climbed to eye-watering levels, paired with transport costs that border on extortionate. But the real problem runs deeper, rooted in the current state of both nations and the particular anxieties that come with watching a major sporting event in a country whose immigration enforcement apparatus casts an increasingly long shadow.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not vanished from public consciousness, despite international headlines focusing elsewhere. The agency continues its enforcement operations with little restraint, targeting undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, and anyone else its officers determine to be problematic. Soccer maintains a strong foothold in immigrant communities across the US, which means the World Cup is shaping up as a potential collision point. There is genuine uncertainty about whether ICE will target games, but even the possibility is enough to create a pervasive atmosphere of unease. Living in the US as a non-citizen now carries a constant, low-level wariness.
The country has also grown demonstrably less welcoming to visitors in recent years. Tourist numbers have plummeted since the return of Donald Trump to power. No major sporting event exists in a vacuum, and there is little reason to believe the World Cup will prove immune to this broader shift in how the country projects itself to the world.
So the logical response would be simple: dust off the Australian national colors and embrace the underdog team from home. For decades, that instinct has been reliable. There is something about the World Cup that brings out Australian identity in ways that little else does, perhaps precisely because it is one of the few stages where Australia can credibly claim the role of underdog. Twenty years ago, a deeply unfortunate collision between Lucas Neill's leg and Fabio Grosso's general vicinity decided an elimination match. The memory still stings.
Yet nationalism, even in its gentlest forms, resists nuance. National identity is built on shared origin, shared context, shared cultural experience. The gap between Australia and the US, despite their surface similarities, is far wider than most realize. An Australian could explain that gap by trying to introduce an American to TISM, or by reflecting on how easily one could return to Melbourne after a decade away, yet never fully become American no matter how long they stayed.
The real trap is that fine line between celebrating similarity and fearing difference. National pride has always sat uncomfortably on that boundary, the place where kinship starts to curdle into contempt for the other, where "us" becomes defined against "them."
Complicating matters further is the simple fact that moral judgment requires clean hands. It is difficult to condemn the Trump administration's scapegoating of immigrants when Australia itself served as a primary inspiration for such policies. It is difficult to criticize American indifference to climate change while Australia remains the world's largest exporter of gas. It is difficult to condemn American regional meddling while Australia has its own history of coercive diplomacy toward neighbors, conducting policy with one hand while the other circles their throat.
An Australian passport confers real privileges, and that is a matter of pure luck. There is gratitude for that. But pride is another matter entirely. To the extent there is pride in either country, it cannot be about what they claim to be. It has to be about what they actually do. And at this moment, neither nation offers much reason to wave a flag.
Author James Rodriguez: "National identity makes sense when you're celebrating what a country does, not what it claims to be, and right now both Australia and America are falling short."
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