[jacquesm]

Three of my friends moved in the other direction (all of them Americans by birth), one with his family in tow.

Having options is good, and it is fairly easy for American entrepreneurs to move to Europe (Germany works if you have enough backing and a good plan) or back again if they decide that's what is best for them.

Healthcare is definitely a factor and so is the climate but when you're young and working hard neither of those will likely move the needle much (but healthcare is a bit of a lottery in the longer term).

The paranoia angle wouldn't factor in for most people, though I can see how if you are prone to that that it will affect you.

If you're an entrepreneur and you wish to address the largest single market on the planet (one language, one currency) with your start-up the USA is probably the place to be if you can get in in an easy way. If not then the EU is likely your best bet but it will be substantially harder to address the EU market than the American one. You might even get a neat balance if you lived in Europe but treated your start-up like an American entity from day one.

[kolinko]

I sadly have to agree with you. Regardless of how much we (Europeans) unify the law, the language barrier will still be there for a long time :(

Having said that, in many cases language is not that big of an issue - for example, if you're doing software as a service, or mobile apps, doing them in english, gives you access to the global market from the day one.

An interesting case is Fintech/Crypto - over there it makes a big difference where you begin, US and EU legal/financial systems being so different. In US, you have the advantage of the language uniformity, but in EU, arguably, the law is much more uniform between the countries - if you get a financial license to run in one of the countries, it allows you to operate in all of them. Also, the laws are uniform, although their execution isn't.

Where US really shines is anything physical (e.g. consumer electronics), and anything local (AirBnB, Meetup.com, and so on) - with these, people expect the service to be in their local language, but I feel it's less and less every year.

[stevenwoo]

One of my college classmates moved about 15 years ago from working for NASA to Europe to work for ESA, I think the decision process is different for African Americans, one has to think about how one or one's child is more likely to be killed by a policeman than a terrorist in the United States (when the President cites terrorism as some existential threat to be addressed by national immigration policies versus no action on police), no matter what your status is, it was not that different for James Baldwin or Richard Wright than it is today.

[jacquesm]

That's a good point, ethnicity likely is a huge factor in making decisions such as these. That said, racism is alive and well in Europe.

[Mononokay]

It's certainly less likely to be a cause of death for your child or person, given officers in general are less armed. And in the UK's case, they ban some of the worst offenders from entering.

[jacquesm]

That's true, in Western Europe police forces are much more disciplined than in the United States. Even so, being a person of color in France is going to be a significant disadvantage in the eyes of the police, less so in most other countries but still definitely not a level playing field. I wish it were different.

What we do have is corruption, and lots of it in some places, again, less so in others. The various countries in the Union are at least as different from each other as the American states.