What was the main reason colonists came to America?

Colonists came to America primarily for religious freedom and economic opportunity, although the actual mix of motives varied by colony, decade, and individual settler. Religious dissenters were prominent among the early arrivals: the Pilgrims sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 to escape Church of England conformity, the Puritans launched the Great Migration to Massachusetts Bay between 1630 and 1640, Catholics found refuge in Maryland under Cecil Calvert's 1634 founding, Quakers came to William Penn's Pennsylvania after 1681, French Huguenots arrived in Carolina and elsewhere after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and small Sephardic Jewish communities settled in New Amsterdam in 1654 and Newport in the 1670s.

Religious freedom in colonial America was rarely universal: most colonies had established churches funded by taxes, Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts in 1635 and founded Providence in 1636, Anne Hutchinson was tried and exiled in 1638, and Quakers were hanged on Boston Common in the 1660s.

Economic opportunity drew an even larger stream. The Virginia Company chartered Jamestown in 1607 as a profit-seeking venture, and the headright system granted 50 acres for each immigrant brought over, fueling indentured servitude that supplied perhaps half of all white migrants to the Chesapeake. Tobacco transformed Virginia and Maryland into export economies; rice and indigo did the same for South Carolina; New England prospered through fishing, lumber, and the carrying trade. Cheap or free land was the single most powerful magnet, since freeholding was nearly impossible in much of Europe.

Other settlers came against their will or under duress. Enslaved Africans were brought first to Virginia in 1619 and grew to roughly 500,000 of the 2.5 million colonial population by 1775 under the brutal Middle Passage. Convicts and debtors were transported, particularly to Georgia, founded in 1732 partly as a debtor haven and a buffer against Spanish Florida. Scots-Irish and German Protestants poured into the backcountry of Pennsylvania and the Shenandoah Valley after 1700 chasing land.

British mercantilist policy under the Navigation Acts of 1651 and after expected colonies to supply raw materials and consume British manufactures, but distance from London and lax enforcement allowed colonial merchants and farmers to build remarkable autonomy. By the eve of the Revolution roughly 90 percent of free colonists owned land, an unheard of figure by European standards. The combination of religious refuge, abundant land, opportunity for upward mobility, and forced migration produced the diverse, dispersed, and self-reliant population that would later resist British attempts to tighten control after 1763.