[monero-xmr]

America also accepts way, way more immigrants than any other developed nation. Japan? None. Norway? Zilch. Netherlands? Come onnnn. They get handfuls but as a percentage of population the USA takes in boatloads and bus loads of immigrants every month.

When you look at statistics that say the US is lower in this or that, remember that America takes in millions of dirt poor immigrants each year, and their circumstances skew the numbers. However they get assimilated and integrated, and a generation later their kids are going to the Ivy League and starting businesses.

[monocasa]

I'm not sure the data matches that line of reasoning. Looking at number of immigrants per capita for various countries, the US is beat out by some of the countries you wouldn't expect from your conclusion. Notably Australia, Switzerland, New Zealand, Canada, Sweden, Austria, Iceland, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, and Norway all have more immigration per capita than the states it seems. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigrati...

[AlchemistCamp]

An Austrian who immigrates to Germany or even a German (or other EU national) who immigrates to Switzerland has a very different experience, both in terms of legal hurdles and likely relative earnings than someone immigrating from Latin America to the US.

How about if we look at immigration into the US as a whole vs immigration to the EU as a whole? What do the numbers look like, then?

[himlion]

Ironically, as a Dutch tech worker without a degree the USA is one of the very very few countries I can't emigrate to.

[bandrami]

The US tech obsession with degrees is stupid and self-defeating. You'll regularly see ads for a web programmer requiring a BS in computer science. Somebody with a BS in comp sci should be able to write a (very simple) operating system, which is not what you need. It's even weirder because some jobs simply require any bachelor's degree, whatsoever, which is how I became a sysadmin after being a classics major. This is just explicit class gatekeeping.

[localplume]

If anything I feel like the US is an outlier in qualification requirements. It feels like every European country requires degrees for every single tech job, whereas in the US you can get by without one or just a BS. The amount of jobs I have seen in the EU that require an MS even though it really shouldn't is insane. I think every single technical ESA role requires an MS at minimum, whereas you can easily work at NASA with just a BS, which doesn't really make much sense.

Also you can still go to community college/a state school to get a BS? Or join the Army or something, take a low risk MOS, get them to fund your bachelors. The US is way less class prohibitive and has far more class mobility than the EU as a whole so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

[twiss]

According to https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index..., the US ranks 27th in social mobility, behind 21 European countries, and ahead of 14 of them.

On the "Education Access" pillar, the Netherlands scored highest, while the US ranks 40th. So I don't think your conclusion is accurate.

[bandrami]

The US has significantly lower social mobility than most of Europe, though I think people kind of ignore that and pretend the opposite is true.

It's a lot easier to get in to college in the US than in most of Europe, but it costs a whole lot more (like requiring a degree in the first place, it's a kind of social gatekeeping). I think nowadays like 60% of high school grads attend some amount of college, but only about half of those get an actual degree.

[lxgr]

Are you serious? There are quite a few more developed nations other than the three you've listed (and I'm not even sure if the claim is accurate for all three, when adjusting for size).

Just last year, Germany has accepted more than a million Ukrainian immigrants – at a population of under 100 million. Yes, exceptional circumstances, but there have been a lot of these in the past decade (consider e.g. the Syrian war). And the number the US accepted in the same year? Just short of 2000. Yes, two thousand, not two millions – at four times the population.

Looking at the statistics, the balance is something like half a million in net(!) arrivals per year in the last decade. (I couldn't find comparable numbers for the US, but granted green cards seems like a reasonable proxy, and that's also less than a million per year, and that's not even accounting for people moving away.) And if you look at the larger EU, the "more than any other developed nation" claim completely falls apart.

The US also gets to cherry-pick immigrants based on skill to a much larger extent than the EU does due to geography alone (requesting asylum generally requires physical presence, and the EU's land and sea borders are a lot easier to cross).

[klipklop]

Pretty intellectually dishonest to ignore the massive amount of “undocumented” immigration happening in the US. Nobody absorbs more immigrants. Full stop.

[lxgr]

I'm willing to believe that that number is (much) larger than granted green cards or visas – but are there any reliable estimates? Otherwise it's just a baseless claim.

One number I've found puts the estimated number of unlawful entries to the US per year at under 100k, for a total population of around 10 million. The EU sees around 2.5 million immigrants, vs. around 1.5 million emigrants, per year.

GPs claim of "millions of dirt-poor immigrants per year" skewing the numbers doesn't seem realistic to me.

[ren_engineer]

Border patrol has averaged around 200K apprehensions per month for 2 years now at the southern border, that doesn't even account for the people they didn't apprehend. Not sure where you got the 100K annual number but it isn't even close to accurate

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigration-border-crossings-us...

[arcticbull]

Well the question is what is the number who make it through? The number captured isn't relevant. If they captured 100% then the undocumented immigration number would be 0. Then we also need to know how many self-deport back over the border.

[bandrami]

It's estimated to be net negative (more people leave illegally than enter illegally). It peaked late in George W Bush's 2nd term and has been falling steadily ever since, crossing the zero point some time during Obama's admin.

It's an entirely made-up "crisis", but a reliably effective one politically.

[arcticbull]

Not to mention Obama deported almost 1% of the entire American population (some 2.5M between 2009 and 2015) - more than any other president either in actual numbers or as a percentage of the population.

[bandrami]

I mean, no. Net illegal migration has been negative since Obama's second term. It's basically an entirely made-up "crisis" and has been for a decade now.