I mean, the implications of having "seven zillion witches" clearly depend on what the witches being hunted in question are. Over the duration of America's exist

I mean, the implications of having "seven zillion witches" clearly depend on what the witches being hunted in question are. Over the duration of America's existence, waves of immigrants arrived from Europe for reasons ranging from belonging to an extreme and/or politically undesirable religious movement, plain poverty, or finding themselves on the wrong side of a war or ethnic cleansing. When Europe decided that it would persecute Jews, the place that did not perform Jew-hunts did probably in fact attract innumerably many more Jews than people who opposed persecution of Jews on principle; it's just that the hyperbolic "seven zillion Jews" did not turn out to be detrimental to a locale's flourishing in a way that the witches of legend are assumed to be in the metaphor. (On the other hand, one could argue that the seven zillion persecuted religious fanatics that formed many of the earlier strata of immigrants did in fact have an adverse effect on the country where they got concentrated. Is the provenance of midwestern millenarians, https://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/19/open_the_gates_that_the_righteous https://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/19/open_the_gates_that_t..., Scientology and other UFO cults entirely coincidental?)