There is one sense in which the US has noticably regressed. Back In The Day we wrote on the Statue of Liberty "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Then in the had a big panic about foreign terrorists in the early 1920s[1], which ended up with the US cutting back on immigration by more than an order of magnitude. The recent panic about foreign terrorism certainly isn't helping, either.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare