That index is confounded by wage compression, which is high in Nordic countries and almost non-existent in the US, and small countries with limited economic diversity. Importantly, "social mobility" is only weakly related to the ease with which you can materially improve your economic situation, which is what most immigrants are after.

I don't think it is controversial at all to say that the US has much higher economic mobility than Europe.

If only. The Nordic countries solve the problem with a very easy trick: They’ve lowered the ceiling by a tremendous amount!

There’s a reason people do their startups in the US, there’s a reason the smart Nords move to the US rather than the other way around. There’s a reason Y Combinator is American.

I encourage you to try innovating in Europe (or just the Nordic countries). Please prove me wrong, for the sake of Europe.

To be fair, it’s certainly not _impossible_ to move up, but it’s relatively much harder, which is the point.

Just a note on your gun death comment. The chance of dying by a gun in the US is very small. Of those killed by guns in the US, less than 3% are killed by anything resembling an "assault rifle". Over half of all gun deaths are suicides, so even those numbers are inflated if what you want to know is "how worried do I need to be about dying because the 2nd amendment allows assault rifle ownership?"

The quick answer is "very little".

It's not the case in Germany, to get into a management role you generally need to be German. Also, the housing market is completely broken with all the good stock in the hands of white German boomers on old rental contracts paying a 1/3 what immigrants pay.

Germany is not a land of opportunity, it is a land of relative comfort, with laws and regulations in place to protect the lives of German boomers. Immigrants will never go far in Germany, but they will be relatively comfortable.