By virtually every metric that matters — employment, crime, fiscal contribution, second-generation mobility — immigration is working dramatically better here than across the Atlantic. Understanding the differences between U.S. immigration and European immigration is indeed a very good idea if you want to design better, smarter U.S. immigration policy — but that’s going to look like “not making Europe’s mistakes” much more than adopting Europe’s solutions.

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The most important reason why immigration is more successful in the United States is the simplest: Europe makes it structurally much harder for immigrants to work.

Rigid employment protection, sector-wide collective bargaining, and high effective minimum wages create insider-outsider dynamics that hit newcomers hardest.

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Most European countries ban asylum seekers from working for six to nine months after filing their claims, often longer in practice. The intent is often explained as discouraging people who are entering for economic reasons from making spurious asylum claims. But about 1 million applications for asylum are filed each year despite this discouragement, and most of those people then become dependents of the state — or participate in the illegal economy — at least for the first while.

What employment bans actually produce is lasting economic scarring: People lose skills, lose contact with employers, and get pushed into informal work or dependency. The negative employment effects persist up to a decade after arrival. And by design, the bans feed the very dynamic of immigrants as a fiscal burden that fuels public backlash.

The United States, for all its dysfunction, lets most immigrants start working almost immediately. And the results are dramatic. The U.S. is a global outlier: refugee employment rates are comparable to those of economic immigrants from arrival. In Europe, it takes refugees a decade or two to narrow that gap.

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In the U.K., asylum seekers banned from working increased property crime; EU workers with labor market access did not. Using Italian legalization as a regression discontinuity, Paolo Pinotti estimated that granting legal work status reduced immigrant crime by roughly 50%.

The United States also bars asylum seekers from working for 180 days. So why does it still outperform? Because until recently, most humanitarian immigrants to the U.S. were resettled refugees who received work authorization on arrival, not asylum seekers subject to the waiting period.

When the recent southern border surge changed that, the results looked more European.

In reaction, New York City spent billions housing people barred from earning a living. This is the closest the U.S. has come to running the European experiment on its own soil, and it produced exactly the outcomes Leonhardt attributed to immigration itself rather than to the policy regime surrounding it.

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Sweden is the instructive failure case.

No country in Europe has invested more in integration services, language classes, and social support. Yet Swedish integration outcomes have been among the worst in the OECD. The lesson is that integration effort does not equal integration design.

You cannot integrate people into a labor market that will not hire them, and spending generously on language courses while maintaining employment bans and rigid hiring practices is the policy equivalent of teaching someone to swim and then barring them from the pool.