America’s 250th: Celebrating Red, White and Every Color and Ethnicity You can Imagine

With President Trump’s bungled war in Iran, bungled renovation of the Reflecting Pool, not to mention bungled tariff war with the whole wide world, one almost feels a little unsure about celebrating the 250^th anniversary of the founding of the country.

An unlikely but just-in-time wonderful event, however, has suddenly brightened the picture of the semi-quincentennial birthday party, and reminded us of one of America’s greatest qualities: its diverse population, especially with its current Exhibit A: the U.S. Men’s National Team advancing in the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

As Newsweek pointed out, six players on the team were born outside the country, and more than half the 26 men on the roster have dual citizenship. Their family immigration backgrounds span eight countries, from Ghana to Liberia, from Croatia to Suriname.

The most touching story belongs to team’s starting forward, Folarin Balogun, who gained the 14^th Amendment birthright citizenship in 2001 when his Nigerian parents were temporarily in New York. One wonders if President Trump really wants to take the citizenship away from someone who represents the best in U.S. soccer.

Even as the Department of Homeland Security keeps using words like “Our Soil” or “Build the Wall” even in its posts on X during the World Cup, many of America’s best and brightest or their parents, like those U.S. soccer players, were not born on this soil.

America’s and the world’s first and only trillionaire Elon Musk, crowned after his recent SpaceX IPO, is an immigrant. Co-founder and CEO of the world’s most valuable company Nvidia, at $4.663 trillion as of June, Jensen Huang is an immigrant. Billionaire businessman Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of the video conferencing Zoom, is also an immigrant.

According to the New York Times, on Mark Zuckerberg’s Superintelligence Lab team of 11 artificial intelligence researchers, all are immigrants, and seven were born in China. The same paper also once cited a MarcoPolo study that said 38 percent of the world’s elite AI researchers were educated in China, and 72 percent them were working in the United States. “A U.S. Secret Weapon in A.I.: Chinese Talent,” the Times proclaimed.

More shiny examples of immigrant success story are Indian Americans. They include Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, our hometown giant; Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet/Google; Neal Mohan, CEO of YouTube; and Ajay Banga, President of the World Bank Group, and more.

The cream of the crop is, of course, America’s Nobel laureates, who are also the world’s best. According to Forbes, American immigrants have been awarded 40 percent, or 45 of 112, of the Nobel Prizes won by Americans in chemistry, medicine, and physics since 2000. Of the six Nobel winners of science for 2025, three were born outside the United States, as reported by the Times. Omar Yaghi, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, grew up in a Palestinian refugee family in Jordan. Katalin Karikó, 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, whose technology was behind Covid-19 vaccines, grew up in a home without running water in Hungary.

The U.S. Census Bureau said in 2023 that its 2020 census counted nearly 1,500 detailed race and ethnic groups of the American population, including American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages. Last year, the Bureau announced its data on over 500 individual languages and language groups spoken across the country between 2017-2021. As Pew Research Center pointed out, America’s immigrants have come from virtually every country in the world since 1850, and in 2022, they counted for 46 million of the total U.S. population of 333 million. United States are not just united states, but also united races and ethnicities of the world.

America has been described as a melting pot, a stew, a salad bowl, a tapestry, a mosaic, a kaleidoscope, and a symphony. Let’s take them all. What joy it is to be in a country where you find every culture, language, music, food, tradition from all over the world. What fun it is to be among a population where everyone looks different, unique, distinct, and notable. Why would anyone want to turn this colorful America into a monochrome one?

Some Americans may have a shared ancestry, a cemetery plot, seven generations back on this soil. The late comers, however, have been building on it, enriching it, and growing a bigger harvest on it. Presidents may come and go, “We the People” will stay. “This land is your land, and this land is my land” will stay. “America the beautiful” will stay.