In
theory, you are possibly right, but in
practice, that is not always the case.
For instance, in France, currently some departments have a fixed number of interview slots per month, meaning people either have to hack their way into finding an available slot (e.g. using scripts to refresh the website in the middle of the night and hope to wake up when a slot becomes available; good luck if you don't know how to hack the system yourself), or they have to pay scalpers to get an appointment.
Then, you get assigned a pre-interview slot, which can take as long as a year of waiting. If you are lucky and everything works out, in the pre-interview, you will get assigned an actual interview slot. Which will be communicated by letter. And which can take yet another year of waiting.
Then, when the actual interview takes place, they give you no definitive answer for almost a year. You only know if it worked out at the end of the process. Overall, the "be in the country for N years" can thus become "be in the country for N+3 years, while not being sure that the next step will actually work or you will be sent back to the beginning"; also, hope that no politicians change the system in the meantime, since all of this is unspecified, so that they can change the rules at any moment and there's no one to complain to.
Of course, your mileage may vary; if you are rich enough to live in Paris, you will probably get better treatment.
So, the US is definitely bad, but the real situation in some Europeans countries is not as good as it looks like.