Maybe bluntly said, but not learning english (or spanish in the south) will reduce the change of a proper job. You'll have to adapt to the american culture. This was/is much less the case in europe.
On another note, I was really unaware that the EU regularly patrols waters and sends immigrants back to certain countries. I thought the policy of the EU was open borders?
Certainly NOT open borders as then we would have whole of africa up here. Certain eu members are more flexible than others, but on the whole we do not want to let in chanceless refugees into the eu, as they are causing significant problems. In fact The netherlands is one of the countries who now has one of the toughest immigration policies.
However, in the PAST it was different in times of shortage of workers. And also we were too tolerant in reuniting families without any restrictions or getting brides out their country of origin who never heard about holland. It lasted until the late 90-ties before we were concluding that our policy failed.
