People are moving to the states not because it's a great country, it's because they're able to make money there. More money than in their home country. This of course is not an indicator of *general* attractiveness but it still makes the country itself attractive as most of the people are seeing more money as a way to have a better life.

This is an issue of trajectories. Perception of Canada and France has not shifted significantly in the observation period; the US dropped by an unambiguous 38%. So it's not about what the US was, it's about what it's become/becoming. An example of Newton's first law, if you will.

Or at least that's how I am interpreting the parent post...

Ah yes, just what we need, more H1Bs running around taking the jobs for which there are plenty of qualified unemployed Americans. That'll do wonders for us, I'm sure!

Excuse me, Hole of America.

You don't even really need to have the military policing the capital and national police force shooting people in the streets. A significant economic downturn is enough to reduce immigration legal and otherwise.

From the graphs, it seems that knowledge of our non-dairy pavement is filtering through to other countries. But a longer term graph would be nice; I'd like to see how the indicator reacted over more economic cycles, but I know some visa categories that had been oversubscribed on opening day for years started staying open for most of the year when the mortgage crisis hit, and I'd love to see data from previous downturns, too.

The biggest drop is from SE Asia which is rapidly developing. I assume many more people wanna stay in their home countries or move to China instead

I'm a "they", and no we don't all want to be in the USA.

In fact, many of us are exactly as hubristic about our nations' popularity as you seem to be about the popularity of the US.

Before I left the UK (for Germany), I encountered people who seemed absolutely convinced that all 8 billion humans would move to the small, moist, sheep-filled rock if not for even stronger enforcement of immigration policies.

The US may be physically larger than the UK, but no, the world doesn't want to move to you. We don't want to regularly share the road with what are, by our standards, monster trucks; nor do we want the 2nd; nor strip malls; nor the nuclear arsenal. Many of us have our own alternatives to Mount Rushmore, to the Statue of Liberty, etc., and don't really care about yours.

Anglophone and still capable economy with pretty strong mobility for knowledge workers. It’s a no-brainer. No other place offers this. China is more dynamic an economy but you’ll be pretty second-class there as a S. Asian based on the experiences of my friends who work there.

The European Union desire to migrate to the US went from 7% to 6%. The article mentions two countries were ranked higher:

> Within the European Union, Spain, at 11%, and Switzerland, at 8%, rank ahead of the U.S., at 6%.

So I think this really shows that EU members don’t have a lot of desire to migrate anywhere. The drop from 7% to 6% is inline with the global decrease in migration desire. I don’t think there’s as much to read into this about sentiment change toward the US.

The UK also dropped precipitously if we’re looking at relative decreases.

Most other countries on the chart didn’t change much because going from 4% to 5% is in the noise.

The US started at a whopping 24% and ended at a number that’s still significantly higher than other countries.

As I said, politics played a role for sure, but when I read the comments before the article I expected to read about the US falling out of favor relative to other countries, which it has not.

I wonder how much the global population getting older influences the desire to migrate.

> Part of the decline is attributable to a global drop in desire to migrate at all.

That's not what the article suggests at all.

The drop is calculated only from those who want to move.

Yes, it's still #1, but the drop that isn't a result of people not wanting to move. Instead, people that want to move are picking the US as the destination a lot less.

Other countries are cracking down which makes desire to migrate less.

That subheadline is more misleading than the actual headline.

The average worldwide is down but that downward trend is largely due to the US. Canada and Japan are up and most other countries are about the same. UK is the only other own with a notable downward trend