http://www.cnbc.com/id/100593528
"Yet when Americans are asked about raising or lowering the number of immigrants coming into the country, only a small portion favor higher immigration levels and a very sizable plurality favor lower levels. A 2006 study by the Pew Hispanic Center, for example, found that 40 percent of those surveyed said legal immigration should be reduced and just 17 percent favored an increase. (Apparently Pew stopped asking that particular question after 2006.)
This chart from Pew shows that as recently as 2012, 69 percent of those surveyed agree that "we should restrict and control people coming to live in our country more than we do now."
Americans are divided over immigration. The lobbyists in Washington? Not so much."
- Venture capital on every corner. Most new businesses are started with capital from friends, family, or other local semi-well-off people (think: the doctors etc. that helped fund Warren Buffett's first company with initial investment). It's extremely common in the US, people don't find it strange.
- Large scale venture capital, eg Silicon Valley or NY.
- The best universities, by far. Beyond the concentration of talent that places like Stanford or MIT have, the US produces immense amounts of research and innovation from its top ~100 universities, which then frequently spin-off into new businesses. Bill Gates has estimated that the US produces 1/2 of all the scientific output on earth.
- Very enshrined protections around freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. This has been critical for companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Friendster, LinkedIn, Reddit, Digg, Blogger, Medium, Wordpress, Movable Type, LiveJournal and a thousand others. Relatively strong property rights protections also help.
- An approach to creating new things that mostly says that things are legal until or unless they're named to be illegal. Basically: do it, don't ask permission. It's why PayPal, Uber and Airbnb were able to break the rules and get away with it for so long. Despite the criticism you'll see of this on HN, it's invaluable. Otherwise, you have a system where you must seek permission for every single thing.
- Common language, common currency and a mostly unified large market under one federal system. Free movement between states allowing talent to go where it needs / wants to. Starting in the US enables you to rush to scale much faster than you can in almost any other market, a position of strength from which you can then go after every other market.
- Massive rewards. The US owns around 43% of all global wealth, with among the highest median incomes, and the fifth highest GDP per capita - matched with three hundred million people that have a high rate of consumer activity. That enables very outsized results.
- Extremely high productivity and high technology adoption across most industries. The US economy remains among the top nations in terms of productivity (as witnessed by its very high GDP per capita), despite its size.
- Plentiful and relatively cheap energy / energy costs. The US is the world's second largest manufacturer. If you need to make something physical in the US, you can still do it for the most part.
Agreed, it's difficult to tell in advance. One way of skewing the odds in favor of the US is to just sell visas to the highest bidder.
Few nativists are opposed to the best and the brightest (and the already-wealthy) coming to the US in very, very small numbers, but what they don't realize is that it's pretty much impossible to tell in advance who's going to be a winning lottery ticket.