When I was at a multinational corporation we had people from our EU and Asia offices fly out to the United States for a couple weeks at a time (their choice).
We'd go out to lunch every day and some of us would have them over for dinner at our houses to get to know them.
Many of them were young and had developed their idea of the US from Reddit, Twitter, and TikTok. They'd show up thinking they were walking into a hellscape of a country because that's what they saw on Reddit.
It was a rite of passage for all of them to slowly realize that the US in person is different than the US according to Reddit or TikTok.
One example that came up frequently was minimum wage. Reddit talks about the federal minimum wage all the time as if Americans everywhere are making minimum wage. We'd have to explain that our state minimum wage was significantly higher than the federal minimum wage. We'd also explain that it's basically impossible to find a job paying that minimum wage right now because even the post office and local fast food places were hiring at higher wages.
The list went on and on. I remember several coworkers who went from thinking the US was a horrible country to asking us to sponsor their moves to the US.
> No one would actively choose to live there if it wasn’t for high salaries in certain fields.
That's a chronically online take, but it's completely wrong. Immigration demand to the United States is extremely high, even for jobs that don't pay high salaries.