In Europe it is a cultural issue also. There is a reason even Canada has Canadian content laws to protect from the onslaught of American music. It is not unreasonable for people to want to preserve culture.
>It is not unreasonable for people to want to preserve culture.
It has sentimental and historical value, but I don't think it's particularly important. We can argue cultural identity, but that's only important so long as there are various cultures. In a monoculture world, the idea of cultural identity would be a lost concept.
Cultural anthropology, which while highly interesting and informative of human relations, isn't very highly valued by most people. The jobs are in such low demand (and with such low salary) that I decided not to try and get a job as a cultural and linguistic anthropologist. Which, while I'd have loved the work and have found it interesting, I can't exactly say it has much "meaningful" merit.
As for CanCon laws, I've yet to speak to a Canadian that was supportive of them. I'm sure they exist - or the laws wouldn't. A large number of Canadian Netflix users mask their IP to be from America to get "better content" [0]. It seems that Canadian nationalism is mostly a 60's/70's generation thing.
The reason people want to move to the US is the US's culture. The people share a wide agreement for rule of law, want to resolve issues through the political process, can usually be shamed into supporting freedom of speech, and don't want to kill their neighbors for having the wrong religion.
It's not something magical about the soil that makes people want to move to the US. It's the culture. The more people that can use it, the better, but add too many new people too fast and it suddenly stops working.
> The reason people want to move to the US is the US's culture.
No dude, it's the money.
I have at least a dozen friends who are on H1Bs working in SV for different large software companies. They're either going there because that's where the best-paying jobs are or they're staying for just a couple of years to save some money.
If you were to beam all the Americans into space and them beam all the Mexicans into their place, they wouldn't magically achieve US levels of income just because of their physical location.
The culture doesn't enable the money. Historical reasons going far beyond that explain it very well, among them: the size of the internal American market, the amount and ease of investing capital within the US, leverage of the US government's global projection of power by its industries, ease of immigration (prior to this past decade's immense increase in difficulty for migrating legally for skilled migrants), etc etc.
It's true that just swapping people places right now would not substitute anything. But you can bet that the immense natural resources, available land and influx of immigrants through the 20th century have impacts as much, if not more, important than whatever contemporary cultural trends exist.
Natural resources don't guarantee success; conversely, lack of natural resources does not guarantee doom. Russia and Brazil on the one hand, and Japan and Britain on the other hand, tiny island nations, relatively speaking.
Culture has a lot to do with it. Brazil had the immigrants (and still does have LatAm immigrants). On the other hand Japan has been very averse to immigration.
Why do you think North Africans move to Europe and South Americans move to the US? Because it's the closest country with the best economic opportunities.
Economic immigration is huge. Cultural immigration is tiny.
In fact American culture is the joke of the world (its media can be consumed from wherever and is quite popular, but its values and policies on things like health care, sexual education, religion, crime etc are mocked by more than a few modern economies) and its institutions (e.g. ensuring freedom of speech, freedom of the press, gender equality, life expectancy, racism, gay rights) usually don't find themselves ranked among the top 20, let alone top 10 of countries.
In fact, it's one of the main reasons I wouldn't want to move to the US. I'm in the Netherlands, my partner is American, we could move anytime. But I much prefer the politics, institutions and culture here. (and it's far from perfect here).
I mean you write 'share a wide agreement for rule of law, want to resolve issues through the political process, can usually be shamed into supporting freedom of speech, and don't want to kill their neighbors for having the wrong religion' as if the US is unique in this regard. You write it as if the poorest people on the planet simply want to move to a country that 'doesn't kill its neighbours for having the right religion', as if this is the nr 1 thing on their mind, if only they could move to such a country! That's ridiculous, as opposed to wanting to move to the US for economic opportunities to get a decent standard of life for them and their family.
It's absolutely not the culture and legal/political process. And occasionally Americans do seem to kill their neighbours for having the wrong religion or skin colour.
It's almost entirely money/opportunity. That drives everything.
Culture is not totally benign. The export of America's culture has had a huge impact on the world, for better or worse. I think people who want to preserve their own culture have reasons aside from simple nostalgia.
Up and till approx the 40s we imported our culture from Europe -as did much of the rest of the economies of the world. American culture exports didn't become popular till the US became an economic power to contend with.
In Asia, however, the cultural exporters, at the moment, are Japan and Korea, not so much China, despite its economic size. Fortunately and unfortunately, Asia is more pragmatic about cultural imports. There isn't the OMG our indigenous culture is being subverted and devoured!!
The pragmatism is in the form of foreign ideas with Asian values which seems to make the ideas less problematic.
Never the less, I think in many places, it's uncertainty or inferiority and superiority complexes which give rise to ideas of wanting to preserve culture. A fear of change. In the US people lament the change in our culture for 'the worse', as some believe. In other places, similar local changes are interpreted as 'westernization'. But really, do they want to go to how their culture existed in 1900, for example?
Culture exports carry with them morals, ethics, and value systems. Different countries have different m/e/v, and they may not want America's. There's nothing to say America has the right set of m/e/v; hell, people bitch about America's puritanical nature on this very website all the time. In which case it's easy to see why a country might be concerned about importing America's culture, given the m/e/v that come with it.
Those are politically motivated posturing. The masses, the consumers, they don't care the way people in some countries decry 'debased american/western culture which undermines our local spirit'.
Only slightly related, but for as much as Americans consider ourselves inextricably linked with Europe, we're much more similar both economically and culturally to South America. The average American's life looks a lot more like that of an office worker in Colombia or Brazil than it does someone in Berlin or London. This is likely because South American countries developed using the USA as a model, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Culturally the US is protestant leaning. Latam is culturally catholic. Latams see Spain as a cultural beacon, whereas the the U.S. now a beacon in its own right, used to have Britain and France as their cultural beacons --yes France was nominally catholic, but they culturally leaned protestant in many ways. They are more northern European than Mediterranean.
Also, while in the U.S. the so called 'old boys net' helps to get things done, in Latam there's something akin to Chinese guanxi (關係) in getting things done. Relationships are paramount and make corruption endemic and inextricable. It's quite diff from U.S. and euro culture.)))
Historically you are right, but as far as things like food, music, business attitudes, etc. there's a lot more common ground. Spain has also lost a lot of its cultural cache in recent years; many South American countries are better places to live at this point (well, unless you have enough money that you don't need a job, in which case Spain is one of the best places on earth).
If I had to pick one thing though, it's the outspoken gregariousness. Europeans are generally pretty reserved; you would never approach someone you didn't know and try to strike up a conversation. A European might tiptoe around a sensitive subject, while people from the USA or South America would be very opinionated and launch into an argument -- even if they don't know you very well.
Also, it doesn't hurt that everyone in South America basically shops at Wal-Mart (seriously, they are freaking everywhere; even more so than in the US).
And not so long ago, corruption was inextricable from business in the US and Europe as well. Trust-busting in the US in the early 1900s broke down the networks here, and WW2 smashed them across Europe, but similar rule-of-law revolutions haven't happened yet in other parts of the world. But they are starting to as the education level rises and the middle-class expands and demands a clean-up.
> Relationships are paramount and make corruption endemic and inextricable.
Well, in honor of the harsh reality USA have also is own quota of this cake, supporting some very shady people in South America in the last decades, like Pinochito for example...
In the US, relationships don't matter as much. They still matter for your career, but someone will do business with you as a way to start a relationship. In many places, the relationship is a prerequisite to doing business. If you don't have the relationship, you can usually just pay a bribe.
I wouldn't try to link the US' foreign policy to our cultural norms. Foreign policy exists in the realm of realpolitik, and every rational actor would likely behave the same way if they were in the US' place. When it comes to setting the global balance of power, anything and everything is fair game. This is why presidents customarily don't criticize those who come after them.
