This is a rude and ignorant statement.

First, you admit that "you and everyone you know" live in Europe. Perhaps consider not making sweeping generalizations about places that neither you nor anyone you know live.

Second, the many US States are far from perfect, as are the many EU member nations, but conditions in the US in general are hardly "shitty."

Other's have pointed out the extraordinary number of immigrants to the US -- there are more immigrants living in the US (40M) than citizens of Poland (38M)[1]. Those are normal people making intelligent, reasoned, self-interested decisions. They didn't leave their homes behind for a downgrade.

But more to the point, generalizing "conditions in the US" is utter foolishness. The US is very much like the EU v0. In the same way that my time living Italy didn't give me a great deal of insight into life in Belgium, a stay in New York City doesn't tell you very much about life in Idaho, or almost any other place in the US. The states are highly autonomous by design, and life experiences vary widely between them.

Yes, New York and San Francisco in particular are having a hard time due to acute housing crises, and some other cities are dealing with housing issues to a lesser extent. Yes, healthcare here is a problem if you don't have insurance.

But fortunately, the majority of the country is not SF or NY, and 92% of people have health insurance[2].

1: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding... 2: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...

> 92% of people have health insurance

I don't mean to take away from anything else you've said, but that statistic is incredibly misleading. It specifically states 92% were insured for at least part of 2019. It also ignores the quality and effectiveness of the insurance.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...

> In the first half of 2020, 43.4 percent of U.S. adults ages 19 to 64 were inadequately insured.

> The adult uninsured rate was 12.5 percent. In addition, 9.5 percent of adults were insured but had a gap in coverage in the past year and 21.3 percent were underinsured.

> A quarter of those who were continuously insured and did not meet the threshold for underinsurance also reported problems paying bills.

> People who reported problems paying medical bills experienced lingering financial problems including damage to their credit ratings and depleted savings.

But grandparent's assertion that Europeans should leave everything behind and hop over the pond for more money isn't rude and ignorant?

I do see your point that it could sound like “everyone wants out,” but FWIW to me it didn’t come across that way.

I read the GP as asking “how will the EU stop the people leaving when they prefer to work elsewhere,” which implies that most people are moving for personal preference reasons rather than jobs. I doubt that is the case - I suspect that most humans would prefer to have both an elite job and their family relatively nearby, thus keeping talent locally is pretty easy if you have elite jobs to offer.

But since the GP didn’t elaborate on why they think people are leaving it’s difficult to argue about the posters intentions.

The US' "shitty conditions" aren't limited to healthcare or housing (but also last time I checked, having health insurance doesn't mean you're actually going to receive the healthcare you need). Look at measures like wealth inequality, police violence, parental and other forms of leave, infant mortality, child hunger and poverty. The US underperforms Europe on many of these metrics.

Also, that the US accepts more immigrants is not an argument for its inherent superiority, especially given how vilified and abused they've been in the past four years. All it means is that there are countries worse than the US, or that better ones have more restrictive immigration policies.

Yet the US has more immigrants than any other country, with an immigrant percentage comparable to Germany (on the high end of larger European countries)[1]. This sounds like more of a "Nobody Goes There, It’s Too Crowded" argument...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and...

"if someone can suffer the US' shitty conditions, "

So crap, that people around the world are fighting to get in, what for those jobs that pay 2-3x, and real exciting projects to work on, and for the most part people that actually don't care about your funny accent.

It's unwise to discount one of the US's fundamental, perennial and systematic advantages as somehow a drawback.

Like it or not - the US has been sucking in global talent since it's inception.

You have to look which countries people are actually migrating from.

Net migration to the US from the richer EU countries is about 0, i.e. about the same number of US citizens are moving into the EU as are moving from those EU countries into the US.

"You have to look which countries people are actually migrating from."

This is a misunderstanding. 'Wealthy' people tend to not migrate anywhere, even America.

Amazingly talented and hard working Asians are coming to America in droves, which is a massive source of competitive wellbeing.

Google, Microsoft, Adobe etc. filling up the ranks with E. and SE. Asians at maybe 33% of their staff in SV for example.

>Net migration to the US from the richer EU countries is about 0, i.e. about the same number of US citizens are moving into the EU as are moving from those EU countries into the US.

Not true. 10-17% of Canadian, British, Australian, and Swiss scientists move to the US. (https://np.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/37lgxg/the_...) These are percentages of all researchers, whether they emigrate anywhere or not. (By contrast, only 5% of US scientists leave theiir country.)

Among the general population, there are 824,000 Britons living in the US, compared to 159,000 Americans living in Britain. Given that the US's population is about five times that of Britain's, that means that on a per-capita basis a Briton is 25 times more likely to move to the US than an American is to move to Britain.

Of course fewer Europeans migrate to the US than in the 19th and early 20th centuries, or compared to Latin American countries today, but they still come and the net flows are still considerably in the US's favor. There are 1.2 million German-born people living in the US, for example, versus only 150,000 American-born people living in Germany, although the US has four times Germany's population. Sweden and Norway? 15,000 Americans in each, compared to 54,000 Swedes and 36,000 Norwegians in the US. Sweden has 10 million people—the size of Los Angeles County—so there would have to be 1.62 million Americans living there to match those going the other way on a per-capita basis. There are 49,000 Swiss born in the US, compared to 24,000 American born in Switzerland. The US's population is about 37 times larger, so a Swiss is 75 times more likely to move to the US than the other way around. There are 71,000 people born in Austria living in the US compared to 7,700 Americans in Austria, implying that an Austrian is more than 300 times (!) more likely to move to the US.

Same with non-European countries; for example, 945,000 Canadians in the US versus 279,000 Americans in Canada. Since the US's population is nine times that of Canada's, on a per-capita basis a Canadian is 27 times more likely to move to the US than the other way around. Yes, the US has a nicer climate than Canada, but this is consistent with other Anglosphere countries; 75,000 Australians and 26,000 New Zealanders are in the US compared to 54,000 Americans in Australia and 13,000 in New Zealand, respectively, so on a per-capita basis Australians are about 20 times more likely to move to the US and New Zealanders an amazing 140 times. Etc., etc.

(All data comes from Migration DRC (http://www.migrationdrc.org/research/typesofmigration/global... see table 4. Military forces are excluded. A less-detailed graphical version (http://migrationsmap.net/#/USA/arrivals) is also available.)

Example for Germany: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2020/10... (German language)

See the line chart at about the middle of the page, with three lines in black, blue and red. The chart shows net migration Germany <> USA. The red line shows German citizens only, black shows people formerly living in Germany, but without German citizen status. In 1998 there was peak in emigration to the US, but from then on the trend moves towards net immigration from the US.

I'd love to look at your data, but that migration DRC link points to an apparently empty wordpress instance.

>See the line chart at about the middle of the page, with three lines in black, blue and red. The chart shows net migration Germany <> USA. The red line shows German citizens only, black shows people formerly living in Germany, but without German citizen status. In 1998 there was peak in emigration to the US, but from then on the trend moves towards net immigration from the US.

Thank you for pointing me to the document. The entire press release is a marvel of sophistry. From its first sentence ("Das Ergebnis der 59. Präsidentschaftswahl der Vereinigten Staaten am 3. November wird mit Spannung erwartet") to the later claim that "Seit 2017 ziehen mehr Personen von den USA nach Deutschland als umgekehrt", is the federal statistics office's communications office trying its best to claim that "Orange Man Bad so fewer Germans are moving to the US" without actually using Trump's name or, more importantly, with data actually supporting the claim. Most people are going to only read the headline and perhaps the first paragraph, and not see that the US hasn't been the most popular destination for German emigrants since 2004, so the recent trend is not a result of the Trump presidency. The US is still the third most popular destination as of 2019, only behind two German-speaking countries; it is ahead of every other country, including the UK and other countries that Germans can move to easily because of the EU and Schengen. Rather than Trump, it looks like the trend is a return to the pre-1990 norm. (More on this later.)

Regarding the chart you mentioned, the black line is presumably mostly Yugoslavian War refugees who used Germany as a stopover to get to the US (thus the late 1990s peak) and would not be applicable in showing native Germans' intent regarding moving to the US.

The red line does not show a recent trend toward "net migration from the US" (impling more Americans moving to Germany than German citizens moving to the US) but that, as the text says, recent population flows between Germany (German citizens) and the US have been almost even in gross terms. This is a reversion to the pre-1991 norm, as opposed to something unprecedented. Further, given that the US has about four times as many people as Germany, this implies that a random German citizen today is about four times more likely to move to the US than an American is to move to Germany.

Of course, these flows are not necessarily permanent; most are likely students, or workers on temporary assignments. Obtaining ciitzenship is a more meaningful indicator of interest. In 2019 4,745 German-born people obtained US citizenship while 1,205 Americans obtained German citizenship. This implies that a random German citizen today is 16 times more likely to obtain US citizenship than an American is to obtain German citizenship.

Further, 75% of those Americans obtaining German citizenship in 2019 do not live in Germany but are taking advantage of the right of return (encouraged, from 2006, by the German Citizenship Project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Citizenship_Project)), while the US does not have a similar law. Only about 300 of Americans obtaining German citizenship actually lived in Germany. This implies that a random German citizen today is 48 times more likely to obtain US citizenship and to move to the US, than an American is to obtain German citizenship.

>I'd love to look at your data, but that migration DRC link points to an apparently empty wordpress instance.

Sorry; didn't realize that the domain had expired. The version 4 I mentioned of the dataset is now at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Units/SCMR/drc/research/typesofmigra....

Thanks for the reply. I fully agree that the Trump framing is horrible, BTW, though it's hard to properly deep link to the data tables on that site. There was no intention to add spin to this discussion :)

Here is the raw data: https://www-genesis.destatis.de/genesis/online?operation=abr...

And: I dont' have an axe to grind here, I just objected to the notion that there is mass emigration from the EU to the USA, because I remembered the numbers for Germany.

What makes meaningful comparison of the numbers nontrivial are differing definitions.

Basis of the graphs are permanent movements away from or to Germany, so students and temp work are not included - https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoel... (sorry, everything German only).

Citizenship is probably a problematic category because it is quite hard to achieve citizenship in Germany. There a millions of persons being born in Germany that don't have citizenship. Compared to the USA, Germany has an essentially racist basis here, though it has been made easier in recent years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_sanguinis).

Many companies are specifically opening engineering offices in Europe because it keeps getting harder to attract foreign talent to the US.

We've banned this account for political, ideological, and nationalistic flamewar. That's not what this site is for and we asked you repeatedly to stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>including having worked for a branch of the EU government.

I'm a bit confused. There is no "EU government". There are EU institutions and EU bodies, but there isn't a central government in the EU.

"semblance of basic humanity"... Obviously you have your own metric on that. The United States takes in more immigrants than any other nation and has done this for hundreds of years. You just have hate within you and it shows.

Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't post like this again.

Please also stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN, and particularly ideological or political battle-style comments. That's not what the site is for. We want curious conversation, not opposing-side-bashing.

I know. My mother was an immigrant to the US. I've also seen family members go broke and commit suicide after being unable to afford medical care that would otherwise would have been provided to them in more humane countries. Apologies if this colors my view of America's "humanity."

It's always about health insurance. It's the one defining characteristic of nations. The narrow mindedness is incredible.

Totally, I mean who cares about health right?

It's not narrow mindedness. The healthcare system in the US can destroy you financially in a couple of years (or even months!), even if you do all the right things and work a job with a good salary, save, etc. All for what? For being unlucky and contracting cancer? For having a chronic disease that needs daily medication? Is that what sick people deserve, to have all their finances wiped away?

This here is a very famous comment on Reddit that perfectly encapsulates what's wrong with the healthcare system in America: https://old.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/hj6t3t/not...

Health is kind of important.

I'm not sure what you're talking about, but watching someone who worked very hard their whole entire lives be blamed for their misfortune, humiliated, and denied access to treatment by the American system of benefits (not just healthcare, this included disability and other services) doesn't result in narrow-mindedness. It results in an accurate appraisal of what is happening to poor people in this country every day. You can find plenty of news stories, just post-pandemic, about people treated similarly by unemployment benefits systems that were designed to be punitive instead of helping people in need.

If those realities are uncomfortable for you and you want to dismiss them, that's perfectly fine, but these stories are out there in plain sight, across the US, for you to observe.