The reason people want to move to the US is the US's culture. The people share a wide agreement for rule of law, want to resolve issues through the political process, can usually be shamed into supporting freedom of speech, and don't want to kill their neighbors for having the wrong religion.

It's not something magical about the soil that makes people want to move to the US. It's the culture. The more people that can use it, the better, but add too many new people too fast and it suddenly stops working.

> The reason people want to move to the US is the US's culture.

No dude, it's the money.

I have at least a dozen friends who are on H1Bs working in SV for different large software companies. They're either going there because that's where the best-paying jobs are or they're staying for just a couple of years to save some money.

It's the culture than enables the money.

If you were to beam all the Americans into space and them beam all the Mexicans into their place, they wouldn't magically achieve US levels of income just because of their physical location.

The culture doesn't enable the money. Historical reasons going far beyond that explain it very well, among them: the size of the internal American market, the amount and ease of investing capital within the US, leverage of the US government's global projection of power by its industries, ease of immigration (prior to this past decade's immense increase in difficulty for migrating legally for skilled migrants), etc etc.

It's true that just swapping people places right now would not substitute anything. But you can bet that the immense natural resources, available land and influx of immigrants through the 20th century have impacts as much, if not more, important than whatever contemporary cultural trends exist.

Natural resources don't guarantee success; conversely, lack of natural resources does not guarantee doom. Russia and Brazil on the one hand, and Japan and Britain on the other hand, tiny island nations, relatively speaking.

Culture has a lot to do with it. Brazil had the immigrants (and still does have LatAm immigrants). On the other hand Japan has been very averse to immigration.

Who have you been talking to?

Why do you think North Africans move to Europe and South Americans move to the US? Because it's the closest country with the best economic opportunities.

Economic immigration is huge. Cultural immigration is tiny.

In fact American culture is the joke of the world (its media can be consumed from wherever and is quite popular, but its values and policies on things like health care, sexual education, religion, crime etc are mocked by more than a few modern economies) and its institutions (e.g. ensuring freedom of speech, freedom of the press, gender equality, life expectancy, racism, gay rights) usually don't find themselves ranked among the top 20, let alone top 10 of countries.

In fact, it's one of the main reasons I wouldn't want to move to the US. I'm in the Netherlands, my partner is American, we could move anytime. But I much prefer the politics, institutions and culture here. (and it's far from perfect here).

I mean you write 'share a wide agreement for rule of law, want to resolve issues through the political process, can usually be shamed into supporting freedom of speech, and don't want to kill their neighbors for having the wrong religion' as if the US is unique in this regard. You write it as if the poorest people on the planet simply want to move to a country that 'doesn't kill its neighbours for having the right religion', as if this is the nr 1 thing on their mind, if only they could move to such a country! That's ridiculous, as opposed to wanting to move to the US for economic opportunities to get a decent standard of life for them and their family.

It's absolutely not the culture and legal/political process. And occasionally Americans do seem to kill their neighbours for having the wrong religion or skin colour.

It's almost entirely money/opportunity. That drives everything.

Certainly, that is not all of it. For example, I would think that many, many Mexicans mainly try to move to the US for the money.

Culture is not totally benign. The export of America's culture has had a huge impact on the world, for better or worse. I think people who want to preserve their own culture have reasons aside from simple nostalgia.

Up and till approx the 40s we imported our culture from Europe -as did much of the rest of the economies of the world. American culture exports didn't become popular till the US became an economic power to contend with.

In Asia, however, the cultural exporters, at the moment, are Japan and Korea, not so much China, despite its economic size. Fortunately and unfortunately, Asia is more pragmatic about cultural imports. There isn't the OMG our indigenous culture is being subverted and devoured!!

The pragmatism is in the form of foreign ideas with Asian values which seems to make the ideas less problematic.

Never the less, I think in many places, it's uncertainty or inferiority and superiority complexes which give rise to ideas of wanting to preserve culture. A fear of change. In the US people lament the change in our culture for 'the worse', as some believe. In other places, similar local changes are interpreted as 'westernization'. But really, do they want to go to how their culture existed in 1900, for example?

Culture exports carry with them morals, ethics, and value systems. Different countries have different m/e/v, and they may not want America's. There's nothing to say America has the right set of m/e/v; hell, people bitch about America's puritanical nature on this very website all the time. In which case it's easy to see why a country might be concerned about importing America's culture, given the m/e/v that come with it.

> There isn't the OMG our indigenous culture is being subverted and devoured

South Korea has laws literally banning Japanese TV and music. One South Korean song was banned from broadcast because it had one Japanese word in it.

Those are politically motivated posturing. The masses, the consumers, they don't care the way people in some countries decry 'debased american/western culture which undermines our local spirit'.