The USA is the country that receives the most immigration and where people want to immigrate the most. So why?
Before the Covid epidemic, a gallup public opinion survey was being conducted in the world in 2018. A question like “Is there a country you want to immigrate to or live in?” Among the answers given by people around the world, the USA comes first. 158 million people want to immigrate to the USA.
The number of people who immigrate to the USA every year is 900,000! Proportionally, it is 0.6%, that is, 6 per thousand, not even 1 percent. Moreover, 700,000 of those who can immigrate do so thanks to a US citizen who is a “family” member. What is meant by immigration is “obtaining one of the immigrant visas”. The total number of people who immigrated to the USA from non-family categories and saved their lives is 200,000! that is, just over one thousandth of 158 million people.
So, why does the USA receive so much immigration?
The USA is not the first country in the world in per capita income. I don’t know, there is no wealth like Qatar, there is no wealth like Luxembourg. Or not Switzerland. Nor is Norway and Ireland.
Let’s do some mental exercise. A person who “earns $60,000 a year” falls into the top 1% of earners in the world. The numbers aren’t 100% accurate, but that’s roughly it. According to 2021-2022 data, the median household annual income in the USA is around US$ 70,000. According to 2020 data, the median income of a US worker working ‘full-time’ (not part-time) for 1 year is just over 56,000.
What does median mean? What does average mean? Let’s explain both of them like this, for those who don’t know.
Let’s hypothetically be a country of 100 people. If the top 1 person earns $500 million per year and the rest of the country earns $100,000 per person per year, the median income level is the middle number in the order from highest to smallest, that is, the average of the 50th person and the 51st person is $100,000. Average income is obtained by dividing the “sum of all” by the number of people. The average income for this country is around $5,099,000 per person, but only one high-income person at the top raises the average excessively and that number does not accurately reflect the distribution in the country.
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Let’s go back to the USA. The median worker in the United States who works “full-time, year-round” is nearly among the top 1% of earners in the world. The population of the USA is around 332,000,000. Assuming the world is 8,000,000,000, a middle-income full-time worker in the United States is among the top 80,000,000 people in the world. (Children and elderly people in that distribution confuse the calculation a little.)
The world’s largest economic power in terms of total economic size is the USA
The oppressed poor of the world are trampling each other for a share of that cake. Every society’s question “where do you want to migrate?” That’s why the answer is USA. Especially cheap workers from India, China or other Asia (plus African, Turkish, Middle Eastern and I don’t know where) are looking for ways to get into the USA at the first opportunity. If the whole continent of Latin America and Central America had the opportunity, they would flow to the USA in hundreds of millions.
In terms of armed forces spending, the US spends around the combined military spending of the following 10 countries. This type of ‘economic and military giant’ also provides stability. A greatness that “cannot be easily overthrown by attack”.
Economically, the alternative to the USA could be the “EU”. The total size of the economies of all EU members may be larger than that of the United States. If we look at it individually, it is not even close to the USA. The locomotive of the very large EU economy is Germany, and the USA built it after the Second World War. ‘They owe their stable democratic regimes to the armed and economic power of the USA’.
Labor is very expensive in the USA
It is incredibly expensive to employ a US citizen on salary. Therefore, the companies’ tactic is cheap offshore resources. There were good employees in the offices my old company established in cheap countries, “even 1/15 of the US salaries” was enough for these people to ‘live comfortably in their country’. The profitability of companies was increasing. My friends who were cheap workers were also dreaming of “could we be transferred to US offices if we showed very high performance?”
This is especially true for Indians. In their countries, annual income per capita is around 1,700 dollars. They are even poorer than Turkey. If they come to the USA with a ‘work visa’ and work only for 3+3 years, they can live comfortably when they return to India. With their US work experience and savings, they can be in very good positions in their country, “professionally and financially”. Former British colony, their native language is English. Unbelievable wealth for them, the US income level.
When we look at the Turks, it is possible to see something very similar. I just saw this on a website: annual median income in Turkey, $5,251. That’s $438 per month.
Divide the minimum wage of 11,402 TL by the current exchange rate of 27.17, you get $420. So, this $438 per month or $5,251 per year are not wrong numbers.
If a full-time worker in the USA has a median income of $56,000, it exceeds that of Turkey by 10 times. It’s about 11 times that. We are talking about per capita, not per household.
Let’s look at purchasing power parity. After all, this above calculation does not take into account the cost of living. Considering the purchasing power, it may be a ‘fair’ comparison.