People generally look for work and immigrate to places with more opportunity, better pay, safety, quality of life. Americans generally don't perceive most other

People generally look for work and immigrate to places with more opportunity, better pay, safety, quality of life. Americans generally don't perceive most other countries as significantly better for them, if they look into moving overseas at all. And we're trapped in a citizenship-based tax system that adds complexity. Unlike Europeans and Asians, Americans can't get to another country by plane or train in a couple of hours. Only about a third of Americans have a passport, and that number only went up fairly recently because after 9/11 we needed passports to go to Canada or Mexico. Personally I live out of the USA most of the time but I work for US companies. Jobs I've seen from foreign companies offer very low salaries compared to the US, and I have yet to freelance for a non-American company because of my US rates. Whether language presents a real barrier or not (my experience as a native English speaker tells me I can get by almost anywhere), Americans perceive language and cultural differences as possible problems, again probably because few Americans travel overseas at all, and when they do they tend to stick to tourist-oriented destinations. Anecdotally I made as many friends from Estonia and Finland as I did Americans, and many more from Germany, France, UK, when I lived in SE Asia. Even in Paris and London Americans seem fairly scarce compared to other nationalities, weird considering the US population compared to that of most other countries.