The Hard Problem of Americans and International Travel
Neither non-Americans nor American liberals are serious about this issue and real solutions to this problem
Of all the blithe well-known quotes about the United States that get passed around online and in person, the passage from Mark Twain about Americans’ lack of international travel is surprisingly underrated and underused, for all the irritation there is in certain quarters on this issue. In case this quote is unknown to you, it comes from his 1869 travelogue The Innocents Abroad:
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on those accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
When American liberals and especially non-Americans chide Americans for not traveling internationally, this is the core dynamic they are referring to. Not merely a lack of international travel, but the idea that there is a connection between that lack and the conservative attitudes of about one-third of the U.S. population, as well as the potential to shift those views.
Whenever this issue is raised, an inevitable response from some liberal Americans appears: We’d love to travel outside the U.S., but it’s too expensive.
Taking that objection in good faith requires acknowledging that wealth inequality goes both ways. There are working-class and poor people in the U.S. and wealthy people. It’s reasonable to think about the attitudes and behavior of people across U.S. society on this question. If there is a serious desire to increase Americans’ international travel, the issue can’t be engaged within the familiar patterns of superiority and defensiveness. Actual solutions to a problem that is more than a century old don’t come from posturing.
Four groups of Americans
Two variables are under consideration: wealth level on the one hand and interest in international travel on the other.
If each variable is treated as a binary choice (for simplicity), then there are rich/poor and interested/noninterested Americans.
Put into a 2x2 grid, the result is four groups:
- A) Rich/Interested
- B) Rich/Noninterested
- C) Poor/Interested
- D) Poor/Noninterested
Nothing needs to be done about Group A, except perhaps wait for the pandemic to come to a clearer end around the world. They can afford to travel internationally and are already interested in doing so. Perhaps many already do.
Next, consider Group C. It’s not hard to do, since members of this group of Americans make themselves known whenever this topic comes up. They firmly believe that their situation is the dominant one regarding the issue, and do not hesitate to say so.
But is it as simple as that?
If someone is poor (even relatively), and interested in international travel, the solution is straightforward: Give them the money and opportunity (time off work, which is money) to do what they already have an interest in doing.
The U.S. federal government could help with this in a few ways.
- End U.S. taxation of income earned abroad
- Lower the fee to obtain or renew a passport (or eliminate it)
- Guarantee entrance into the Peace Corps for Pell Grant recipients after college completion
- Pass a federal paid vacation law that applies, at the least, to federal employees and contractors, if not, in some way, to the private sector also
- Pass and implement a fully-refundable tax credit (an actual grant check) for hostel expenses as an amendment to the GI Bill and/or as an incentive for all public high school students who fill out the FAFSA, valid up to age 25 (or 30!)
- Raise the federal minimum wage to $15 or $20/hr, along with taxes on the rich to preserve its value
- Raise the lowest income tax bracket so that it only applies to incomes over $40,000
These are back-of-the-envelope proposals, and I won’t continue sketching out public policy in a Medium post.
The point is this: as a society, the U.S. could solve the specific problem of poor citizens’ lack of interest in international travel – if enabling Americans who want to gain that experience was enough of a societal priority that we were willing to put cash into doing something about it.
The obstacle here for the U.S. as a society is not a lack of money. It’s 1) the anti-welfare attitudes that drive people to oppose a federal guaranteed paid vacation policy and subsidies to various parts of the civilian population for any purpose; and 2) the attitude that international travel is elitist, liberal, unpatriotic, a frivolous thing that isn’t necessary for life, not only but especially for those who can’t afford it.
This leads to the core group of American non-travelers – Groups B and D, those actually uninterested (at best) in international travel.
Group B, the rich Americans who are uninterested, show us that money doesn’t hold all Americans back. Not everyone in the U.S. is too poor to travel. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the U.S. Representative from Georgia, comes from a successful mid-size family construction business, inherited from her father. She has a net worth in the tens of millions. She could afford to go spend a month in France, let alone lower-cost countries like Thailand or Egypt. She could likely afford to do that yearly.
So why hasn’t she?
She and her fellow Group Bs show us that money isn’t a cure-all, and that the roots of this are deeper.
Anti-cosmopolitanism is real
On just about any other issue in American society, we recognize the existence of two opposing positions. Gun control opponent versus gun control supporter. Pro-abortion rights versus anti-abortion rights. Climate change deniers versus those who don’t deny it.
Yet there is one key overall dynamic behind each of these divides: how open people are to new experiences, new information, and challenges to their assumptions.
Why do we not recognize that this dynamic shapes a divide between Americans about international travel?
Why do we insist that there’s no actual reason (beyond vague brainwashing) that Groups B and D have little interest in it?
Not being open to the new experiences of international travel is not that different than not being open to the science of global warming (or evolution), or to the experiences of people who don’t think/look/love/believe/work like you. It’s the same impulse that makes conservatives from the Midwest eat at Applebee’s when they come to a big coastal U.S. city.
There genuinely are two sides here, and Mark Twain told us in the 19th century how big the non-cosmopolitan side is in the U.S.
If you want to increase international travel among Americans, you have to deal with the motivations of Group B (and D) – the aversion to novelty, the anti-cosmopolitanism, the sense that leaving the country at all is a betrayal of it that should only happen under extreme political and economic circumstances forcing you into exile.
Hosannas to the glories of discovering new things do not work to convince anti-cosmopolitans to travel abroad. We need to think about what would motivate them in terms of their worldview.
The “Love it or leave it” problem
As one of my ESL students once put it, anti-cosmopolitan Americans don’t have “the concept of an international vacation”. I would even say almost all Americans think first of going somewhere within the U.S. for whatever time they (might currently) have off. Even for cosmopolitan Americans, it’s uncommon to jaunt across an ocean on a whim, even for Group A.
No, for most Americans, the prospect of going abroad is a serious matter (serious enough that formal, pretentious words like prospect seem like a good fit.)
Starting with the backlash to anti-Vietnam War protests in the late 1960s, though, a sharper political dimension was added to the idea of Americans going abroad. Those people who were opposed to the protests and to the growth of a left that was critical of American imperialism and domestic repression began to nurture a more intense, sharper-elbowed patriotism. One key idea was that the leftists were essentially intruders disturbing the population of real, ordinary, patriotic Americans.
What is the solution to someone coming into your space and loudly telling you that everything you are doing is wrong? Well, you tell them to shut up and get the hell out. They were the ones who were threatening to shirk their responsibilities (the draft) by fleeing abroad, after all.
And that’s what white U.S. right-wingers have told the U.S. left ever since: Shut up and love the country (as it is, with no thought to correcting its many structural and ideological flaws and human suffering), or leave it and go into exile. The U.S. right knows there are other countries in the world; it just thinks that’s where the U.S. left should go.
Exile for those who don’t have or have lost fundamental political and economic power in the U.S.: That’s what the American right thinks international travel is. They have no concept of taking in Paris in May for the opportunity to see the Louvre and its priceless works of human genius, let alone sitting on a beach in Thailand/Spain/Brazil/Greece/etc. One ordinary American white Republican — a member of the base of the party, the ideological core — was asked by a reporter whether she was interested in international travel. She almost laughed in smug disinterest. “Why? We don’t have any political or economic need to leave our country. We have everything we need here.”
On the question-and-answer site Quora in the early Trump years, there was a white American man who had been a right winger until the combination of the 2008 financial crash and his wife’s business transfer to another corporate branch forced him to move to Germany. He then had a very rude culture shock. He came out of the forced “exile” experience as a committed social democrat. So the American right lost a member.
Short of causing repeated global financial meltdowns, what would motivate financially comfortable American anti-cosmopolitans to go abroad? Why would poorer anti-cosmopolitans be tempted by financial incentives for something they don’t want to do?
A possible solution
For right-wingers and their psychology, being attuned to threats and ready to respond to them is crucial. Goodness knows that U.S. right-wingers see threats under every rock already — most of them nonsense. So if the U.S.’s rivals (China, Russia, arguably the EU), are shown to have more knowledge of the U.S. than Americans have of them, that may be a catalyst for a response from the American anti-cosmopolitans that is non-complacent and not so smug. This is something like the logic of the quite conservative Meiji Restoration period in Japanese history. We’re behind; we’ve got to catch up with the rest of the world.
I think video clips of the French and Russians sneering that there’s no such thing as American culture might work. But trial and error will be necessary to develop the case.
Before cosmopolitan Americans can do that work, however, we all have to acknowledge the real nature of this issue. Money can help you if you want to do something that you are too broke or poor to currently do. It can’t open your mind to the possibilities of venturing beyond your secure little corner of the world, and certainly not when you actively don’t want it to. It can’t convince you that leaving your country to see the world is a positive thing.
Something else needs to do that because the current debate isn’t changing anything. If you are annoyed that Americans don’t travel, it’s time to engage seriously with the root causes.
