[frikskit]

High fractions of Europeans speak English, eg Poland has 50% of population speaking English (for those of working age it’s probably much higher) whereas the fractions of Americans speaking non-English European languages is much lower (0.25% for Americans speaking Polish).

If 50% of Americans spoke Polish by the shake of a wand, I bet there’d be more Americans in Poland than Poles in Poland.

[georgeecollins]

OK, but by that logic lots more USA citizens should be moving to the UK, Ireland, Spain than the other way around. That's just not the case, at least until very recently.

I could see that the appeal of Ireland can be increasing and Poland sounds cool. I'm not saying that the USA is great, it has tons of problems.

[frikskit]

Net migration US/Ireland is positive to Ireland.

UK numbers yes, though maybe gloomy weather plays a role? Just kidding. That said, Brits are slightly more likely to move to Spain than US despite it being a tiny country in comparison and not necessarily easier to move to after Brexit.

Spain, not sure. It’s tricky to compare since non immigrant Spanish speaking population in US is probably significantly lower than Spaniards speaking English. But yeah, you probably have a point on that one.

[LastTrain]

Your wand would also need to erase the reason people speak (or don’t speak) the languages they do, otherwise what you said would already be true for the UK, Australia, etc.

[frikskit]

Would it? People don’t exclusively learn English to migrate to the US.

What language do you think Germans and Spaniards use to do commerce with each other? There needs to be a common language, there’s no bandwidth to learn all languages, so due to historical and modern reasons, English prevailed.

Re Australia, Australians have highly preferential options to move to US which is not reciprocated.