Eileen Gu Indicts Birthright Citizenship And Our Entire Immigration Orthodoxy

If Eileen Gu’s mother came to America for a better life, she got it. Yan Gu, the daughter of two Chinese government officials, emigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s, just a few decades after the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, which overhauled immigration policies and prompted a massive increase in arrivals from Asia and Latin America. Educated at Auburn University, Rockefeller University, and eventually Stanford Graduate School of Business, she dabbled as a ski instructor and, apparently, in venture capital.

In 2003, she gave birth to a daughter in San Francisco, raising her in an affluent Bay Area neighborhood. What’s known of Eileen Gu’s childhood reads like a caricature of coastal elitism: skiing in Lake Tahoe at age three, educated at a girls’ school where this year’s tuition costs are upwards of $48,000 per year, presented at Le Bal des débutantes in Paris, groomed for Olympic stardom, and now studying at Stanford, modeling, skiing in the Olympics, and juggling multimillion-dollar brand deals.

Her story would be elevated as a saccharine picture of the neoliberal American dream, if Gu hadn’t decided to ski for China. In 2019, she announced her intent to compete for the People’s Republic of China at the 2022 Beijing Olympics. Since then, she has received millions of dollars from the Chinese Communist Party government, according to The Wall Street Journal, and has become one of the biggest propaganda tools in the arsenal of the United States’ biggest adversary.

12K likes, 3,227 comments - eileengu on June 6, 2019: "I have decided to compete for China in the upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics. This was an incredibly tough decision for me to make. I am extremely thankful for U.S. Ski & Snowboard ( @usfreeskiteam ) and the Chinese Ski Association for having the vision and belief in me to make my dreams come true. I am proud of my heritage, and equally proud of my American upbringings. The opportunity to help inspire millions of young people where my mom was born, during the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help to promote the sport I love. Through skiing, I hope to unite people, promote common understanding, create communication, and forge friendships between nations. If I can help to inspire one young girl to break a boundary, my wishes will have come true. 🇺🇸 🇨🇳 ❤️".

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@montselewin

ICE destroys families. And some of you still sleep peacefully knowing you voted for the man who made it worse. Don’t pretend you care about Latinos now. We won’t forget. We won’t stay quiet. Fuck ICE. We’ll keep showing up for each other, because no one else will.

♬ original sound - montselewin

“We do not move to America because we think it’s a better country,” she says, in a video viewed more than 91,000 times on TikTok. “You’re stupid to think that we move to this country for some hot dogs and some baseball. We have better vibes, music, food, culture, history, literally all of the above. We just move here because we are looking to make more money. …”

(She also says she hopes any Americans who support our immigration law enforcement will “rot in hell.”)

@montselewin

ICE destroys families. And some of you still sleep peacefully knowing you voted for the man who made it worse. Don’t pretend you care about Latinos now. We won’t forget. We won’t stay quiet. Fuck ICE. We’ll keep showing up for each other, because no one else will.

♬ original sound - montselewin

Mercenary as it is, that’s precisely the counterfeit American dream that’s been sold to aliens and Americans alike by the powers that oversaw the biggest influx of foreigners into America in history.

In 2017, the George W. Bush Institute published an essay by Bush’s Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, titled “Immigrants Put America First: In Coming Here, They Affirm Our Values.”

“Immigrants enter the United States with dreams of a better life for themselves and their families,” he wrote. That much is true: From poor and desperate workers from the Global South to privileged arrivals like Yan Gu, everyone wants to enjoy the money, comfort, and freedom available in America. Every Somali migrant raking in fraudulent welfare checks in Minnesota is enjoying a “better life” on the American taxpayer’s dime, as are immigrant families back in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador, where remittances from America make up a quarter of each country’s entire GDP.

Gutierrez says this desire to profit from American wealth and opportunity is proof that immigrants “put America first” and “reinforce and enrich the values that make America the country it is.”

If that were true — if the “values that make America” were economic self-enrichment and desire for a “better life” — then Eileen Gu would be a model citizen. She embodies all the virtues of the post-national “elite” who view America as a land of economic opportunity and nothing else, an office park where hundreds of thousands of American jobs are happily handed over to H-1B visa holders in the name of Gross Domestic Product.

There's a reason that major media outlets and luxury brands all fawn over Eileen Gu. It's the quintessential Davos mindset in action.

What conservatives view as traitorous, they frame as the shrewd moves of a savvy entrepreneur who is maximizing her marketability and global… https://t.co/5xzD6Npzqh

— Melissa Chen (@MsMelChen) February 15, 2026

Controversy always seems to find Eileen Gu because she’s a traitor to her country and a shill for communist China, which has rewarded her betrayal by making her fabulously wealthy.

But please, do go on with your journalisming. https://t.co/68KoFbMfxt

— John Daniel Davidson (@johnddavidson) February 17, 2026

But if you understand that the American dream is not about economic enrichment, but rather the freedom to live virtuously and to secure that freedom for posterity by participating in self-government, you understand that Eileen Gu is a failed American and a traitor. Being born in San Francisco did not make her American, in any meaningful sense, any more than wanting to earn more money or being tired, poor, and huddled turns masses of economic migrants into Americans.

America is a heritage descended from the greatest civilizations of the world, refined on the frontier, and dedicated to man’s freedom to dutifully live as he ought. She has gladly welcomed many who seek the same goal — like the family of Alysa Liu, an American Olympic figure skater whose father fled the same country Gu represents. But wanting to enrich yourself doesn’t make you an American, and it’s time to stop humoring the pretense that it does. The proof is in the person of Eileen Gu.