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Comment by yucky | Hacker News Reader

Our immigration system is our biggest advantage? Are you sure it's not the thing(s) that makes people want to immigrate here that is our biggest advantage?

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Anyone willing to leave their home country is almost always guaranteed to be a hard worker. It’s why immigrants are disproportionately successful compared to natives. Anyone who isn’t already a hard worker will not bother immigrating.

That doesn't explain why they choose the US in such large numbers though. If this is the best and the brightest they could go be just as successful anywhere else too. So why is the US such a magnet?

Cause US is the largest and the most superior on so many indices economicaly, sometimes providing the only top notch opportunities in the whole world (e.g., advanced high-tech). However, lots of hard working people from poorer or less developed parts of the world immigrate to countries other than the US in large numbers (legally, for education and skilled work). Most people in African countries (North Africa in particular, but also subsaharan, with the exception of South Africa) immigrate to Europe, namely France, Germany and Sweden. And immigration is just as successful as in the US (there are lately immigration issues in Europe, but it's a different type of immigration, refugees and asylum seekers, caused by destabilised regions in the middle east. I'm talking about regular immigration for education and skileld work).

You can't separate those things. Immigrants create conditions (prosperity) that make people want to immigrate.

Is that a logical conclusion? Seems like other countries would do the same if it were that simple.

Simple does not mean easy. It is hard to become a country that attracts the brightest immigrants in the world.

Isn't yours a recursive argument then? You say immigrants are what makes it attractive to immigrate here.

It's a positive feedback loop.

Getting one started usually isn't a conscious policy choice. You have relatively better conditions to start with (no war, good location with stable climate, good civic institutions, limited immigration restrictions) which kicks off the virtuous cycle.

Here's an example. The Irish famine led to Irish emigration down the road, which benefited the US and Australia. This wasn't a policy choice of the receiving countries. It was mostly luck. These kind of relative differences in liveability between the two countries (US > Ireland) leads to a positive feedback loop in the US.

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