America, Forty-Three Years After Reagan’s “Evil Empire” Speech

On March 8, 1983, President Ronald Reagan warned that the Soviet Union was “the focus of evil in the modern world” and urged Americans to resist “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire.” Years later, in his Farewell Address, he called America a shining city on a hill. Together, those ideas shaped the moral vocabulary of the era I entered as a child.

I arrived in the United States from France as a Cambodian refugee in October 1985 and enrolled as a 7th grader at Willard Junior High in Berkeley the following January. I was still learning English, still recovering from the Khmer Rouge years that had taken both my father and brother, and still trying to understand what safety meant. During a lull in Mrs. Morrison’s English as a Second Language class, I decided to write a letter to the president. I wrote it by hand, thanking him for fighting the evil empire. I addressed the envelope with three words: The White House. I did not know the finer points of mail delivery, but I believed that in this country, good intentions and truth would find their way.

Looking back, that letter captured how I saw America then. I had fled brutality and silence. Here I saw light. I believed President Reagan’s shining city on a hill was real, not metaphorical. It was where I had landed. It was where people were valued. It was the opposite of the world I had escaped.

Forty-three years after President Reagan’s speech, I find myself rereading those famous phrases, and I feel a growing unease. Not because I think the United States has become the Soviet Union of 1983, but because the traits President Reagan condemned abroad have begun to appear at home. His language about evil empires now makes me look inward before I look outward.

President Reagan warned about governments that bent truth to maintain power. As a refugee child, I believed that happened only in other places. Today I watch misinformation shape our national understanding of migrants and asylum seekers. People who arrive seeking protection are cast as threats rather than survivors. Their stories are replaced with slogans. Fear becomes a substitute for fact. This is the very dynamic President Reagan claimed America stood against.

He also said that a nation’s character can be seen in how it treats human beings. That line lingers because I believed America excelled at this. Today I see families detained after dangerous journeys. I see children held in facilities not meant for them. I see policies designed to deter rather than welcome, and court backlogs that leave people in limbo for years. These are choices that contradict the identity America taught me to believe in.

As someone who came here as a refugee, teaches, and now volunteers in the broader field of displacement and humanitarian protection, I feel the weight of this contradiction. A shining city on a hill does not fear the stranger. It does not place desperation behind fences. It does not allow myths about refugees to eclipse their realities. A shining city sees the vulnerable as a test of its integrity, not an inconvenience to manage.

What troubles me is not just a single policy but the drift. The slow erosion of the ideals that once set America apart in my mind. The willingness to accept detention as routine. The rush to label asylum seekers as threats. The readiness to place people into categories that make it easier to disregard their humanity. These patterns echo the logic President Reagan used to distinguish America from the evil empire he denounced.

I still remember the pride I felt as a 7th grader sealing that envelope addressed to The White House. I believed the president of the United States would read the words of a refugee child and see in them a small example of the country’s purpose. That memory stays with me because it represents the very best version of what America can be.

President Reagan closed his 1983 address with a call to moral courage and invited Americans to act on what they knew in their hearts was right. For me, that invitation still stands. It asks us to decide whether we will be guided by fear or by principle, and whether the shining city he described will remain an aspiration or fade into nostalgia.

America can still be the place I believed I had found in 1986. The question is whether we are willing to choose it.

Sophal Ear is an associate professor at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, a Refugees International board member, and a former Cambodian refugee who fled the Khmer Rouge.