It sounds good/bad (depending on your perspective) if you put the USA down at country #40. However, data and statistics are tricky things. For example: 1) Many

It sounds good/bad (depending on your perspective) if you put the USA down at country #40. However, data and statistics are tricky things. For example: 1) Many of the first 39 countries don't come anywhere close to the "pick a better country" requirement. E.g. Lebanon at #1, Zimbabwe at #3, Libya at #6. 2) Many of the countries are tiny. E.g. British Virgin Islands has a population under 29,000. So they might look good per capita, but they hardly matter in absolute numbers. 3) There will, of course, be requirements for immigrants. But some might be rather draconian. E.g. will the UAE even allow an immigrant unless he's already a Sunni Muslim? 4) While it sounds impressive that 39 countries are "ahead" of the USA, I totaled up the population of the first 10 on the list and it came to 51,533,343. (I was too lazy to cut/paste the rest out of Wikipedia). The point is that even though the USA per capita is lower than those, we make up a lot by having 321,605,012 "capita" already here. 5) I did a quick search for number of illegal immigrants per year into USA and came up with 500,000. The estimates differ widely, so who knows the real numbers. We probably (wild speculation!) have more illegal immigration than the other developed countries on your list. E.g. it's hard to get into New Zealand by sneaking across the border. Oh and BTW New Zealand is actually #45, not "before" us.