“When a metric ceases to match a target, invent a new measure.”
with apologies to Goodhart.
with apologies to Goodhart.
The UK's ranking fell for similar reasons as well.
If not having visa-free access to PNG or Venezuela is a metric, it's not a fairly relevant metric, or at least a very lossy metric.
Out of curiosity, why don't we see the same degree of Brazilian immigration to the EU then versus the US?
Is it solely economic (ie. a Brazilian accountant is more likely to demand a salary significantly higher that that back in Brazil by moving to the US versus an EU state)?
There's actually an estimated ~2 million Brazilians in the EU and also in the US (out of 220 millions)
There are a lot of Brazilians in the EU, most have legal residency through heritage (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian are quite common 2nd passports) or through work visas.
You can't discount the huge influence the USA has over Latin America, and specially over Brazil, people look up to the USA as a benchmark/role model, many Brazilians dream of "making it" by moving to the USA; Brazilians also suffer a huge influence from the consumerist aspect of the USA, they want to have nice cars (which are cheaper relative to salaries than in Brazil), they want to buy electronics that are expensive in Brazil: consoles, computers, phones, they want to buy clothing that is considered expensive in Brazil, there's a quite markedly status-chasing aspect of Brazilian society that mimics the American one. Brazil was somewhat molded according to the USA: car-dependent, consumerist, etc. so a lot of Brazilians believe that the USA is what Brazil "could be" if it was richer.
There are many support groups from past immigrants to help out settling in the USA, it's also much easier to live in the USA undocumented than in most of the EU: in the USA there's no centralised identification at the federal level, in the EU most countries require you to have a tax ID to do most of the basic bureaucracies you need to settle.
It's a confluence of factors that make Brazilian immigration into the USA very different than into the EU. From my experience most Brazilians in the EU are high-skilled immigrants or have a second citizenship or are spouses of natives/citizens.