Why do so many people move to the Falkland Islands? (2009)
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My young friend went on contract for a year, doing fishery research. After a few months they said "We aren't going to pay you any more. You can't leave because the boat won't come back until {whenever}. And if you say anything, we won't give you the recommendation you need as a young researcher doing a PhD."
She had to stay for months working for nothing. It's slavery, and they know it, and that's how it works.
Don't go.
And after their hold on her was over, she should have screamed to the hills.
While I get the reluctance, at the same time, not yelling about it means others get burned.
That's just plain wrong.
A PhD student is hostage against the system.
Sounds like she should wait until after she gets her phd, then scream. And, while leveling accusations at the professor too.
He's as guilty as they are.
Don't let time, let scum win.
Yes, you may save others but I cant blame someone for makinf the pragmatic choice for their lives and family.
I recommend against it in almost all cases for people I care about, because people have this natural infatuation for victims that is obviously prurient (whether it's love, reverence, hate, or even disgust) and you yourself are going to end up the center of the storm.
If they decide to do it anyway because they're better people than me. I try to make sure they don't do it stupidly, and work with them on a careful plan that minimizes their personal danger and has the best chance of succeeding.
That's criminal, and it's worrying you're justifying it under an account named "Workaccount2"
She's now an officer in my son's startup.
The ratio of people that can make a living doing research to people that are entering PhD programs is way, way off, which naturally produces a zero-sum hypercompetition "market" among PhD students that can only end in "success" by people able and willing to work crazy hard for no money for years on end - aka the already-rich, the desperate true believers, the delusional, or some combination of those three.
To make things worse, all the money in universities is being sucked up by the explosion of the self-licking ice cream cone of middle management catering to the "student experience" or whatever else.
Look up the absolute explosion of management salaries in universities in the last 20 years.
The horror stories of things they endure would fill hundreds of volumes. One told me another prof just stole her dissertation topic, and she lost two years. Innumerable others get caught in academic politics because another prof doesn't like theirs.
As many people say below, being a whistleblower brings a heavy personal cost, and no one should say "you should publicize this" without being aware of that.
That sounds like all British immigration rules. My employer had to apply for my visa and had to pay all my healthcare contributions for a year up front before I could move for a job in London. If I lose my job I have a few weeks to find a new employer (who will have to be willing to pay for a visa transfer) or I have to leave the country.
It's a bizarre system but it seems like this reporter doesn't know how normal it is. I doubt British people know how bizarre the policies that arose from their voting are either.
(Likewise for Europe and the US)
> pay all my healthcare contributions for a year up front
Is fine by itself, at least assuming you then get a discount on the PAYE taxes that you’re essentially pre-paying here.
> If I lose my job I have a few weeks to find a new employer (who will have to be willing to pay for a visa transfer) or I have to leave the country.
Paying to transfer the visa seems a bit strange to me (though I’m conscious of my own naïveté), but otherwise this is also fine by itself.
Both together? Not so much.
There's a bureaucracy to support, so fees for everything they do.
If you don't have to pass through a military base to get somewhere, there is a bit of wiggle room. You are supposed to do X, Y or Z but there end up being some exceptions.
In this case, the military base has a stranglehold on entry so you aren't likely to see folks bending the rules a tad.
Much easier if you have a land border for illegal immigrants to wander in, as the US can attest to with it's ridiculous scheme to "build a wall" to resolve the issue.
If you are not aware, then you haven't looked very hard:
> Subsection 3(2) of the Citizenship Act states that Canadian citizenship by birth in Canada – including Canadian airspace and territorial waters – is granted to a child born in Canada even if neither parent was a Canadian citizen or permanent resident except if either parent was a diplomat, in service to a diplomat, or employed by an international agency of equal status to a diplomat. However, if neither parent was a diplomat, the nationality or immigration status of the parents do not matter.[28]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli#Continental_North_Ame...
Children born in France only get French citizenship from birth if at least one parent either is a French citizen or was born in France. Otherwise, there are various processes for them to acquire citizenship later in life if they spend enough of their childhood in France.
In contrast, almost any child born in the US, regardless of the nationality or immigration status of the parents, is a citizen automatically from birth. The only exceptions are children of foreign diplomats and (hypothetically) children of members of an invading army. Even if the parents are visiting as tourists and the child leaves two weeks after birth and never returns, it's still a citizen.
British law is somewhere in between the two- a child born in the UK is a citizen if at least one parent has "settled status" (in other words is a citizen, permanent resident, or otherwise has an unrestricted right to live in the UK).
Imagine being a sperm donor, but in dozens of countries.
Now your progeny will have a large range of citizenship, and locations, from which they may thrive during disaster.
Better than sailors and ports, for one can travel, experience sunny and interesting destinations, make a deposit, and... success!
I see a new startup, which combines cruise ships and pre-arranged donation instructions / locations.
Looking for a co-founder...
Though, if the goal is to maximize the donor's entertainment, I don't see why we're using artificial insemination.
...
Have you ever seen a stud bull get shipped to a farm?
...
I feel this could end very badly. Like,
Form AirBnB.
...many years later...
All real estate is unaffordable.
Like, there'd be throngs of George Clooneys and Barack Obamas with weird recessive diseases.
And a bizarre fan-club in China of Vladimir Putin babymommas.
...
Didn't Stephen Colbert have a product like this? (I swear, if it had been real, some people would have bought and used it.)
...
We'd recreate that unexplained prehistoric situation, preserved in the genetic record, where a population bottleneck shows up only on the Y chromosome.
Speaking of bizarre, why are there zero barriers for a Finnish person to move to Portugal, but major barriers for a Brazilian, culturally more proximate due Portuguese colonialism to do the same? Why are there zero barriers for a Greek or Estonian to live and work in Spain but tough immigration rules for the spawn of their 15+ latin american colonies, who speak the same language and have the same religion?
Insurance works when a large group of people pay premiums to protect against some condition that has not happened yet. If you could sign up for a fire insurance once your house is burning, the system would collapse.
For similar reasons, modern states need to keep poor people out since, on average, they will be a large net burden on their welfare systems.
Asian countries are also notoriously hard to get citizenship in.
> Why are there zero barriers for a Greek or Estonian to live and work in Spain but tough immigration rules for the spawn of their 15+ latin american colonies, who speak the same language and have the same religion?
Could be worth exploring for Spain and Portugal.
There's a "transitive property" issue, however. It'd be hard to do this without, effectively, adding the former Spanish and Portuguese empires to the EU.
This would also run into the Monroe Doctrine, if you carried it far enough.
But it is an interesting idea.
Out of these 11% only a third were from EU (including Great Britain), 6.5% of the foreign nationals were from Latin America, taking 5 out of the 15 countries from which most Immigrants come from, and the biggest year to year increase in immigration is from Venezuela (39.8%), Colombia (31.3%) and Honduras (29.4%).
Barring exceptional circumstances, presumably the employer takes the decision to recruit externally for cost-cutting reasons; it's important then that the hidden costs of healthcare etc are not passed on to the tax payer.
I'm guessing the prepaid contribution refers to the "NHS surcharge": https://www.freemovement.org.uk/what-is-the-immigration-heal...
(while Americans are probably going "hey that looks cheap at £624 a year compared to my insurance", note that it's not insurance and you still have to pay it if you have private cover)
I can earn $x here or $(x - y) to be in the uk. In the UK I get healthcare on the NHS. I move. I quit / am fired / co goes (creatively?) broke. And I keep the healthcare on the NHS and have time to start a family before deportation etc.
Think about large values of y or indeed kickbacks. Does the firm really want /me/? Or do they just want cash which they get by paying very low (or taking a fee from me) as I get an end run around the immigration system to get healthcare without making the contribution, queue jumping better qualified, harder working, more civic minded people with greater compassionate grounds for being accepted? As ever there's a continuum. "Clearly this person is legitimately... ...then the unexpected thing happened." ends up being harder and quite expensive to identify and enforce fairly and equitably with a public service doing so.
I say nothing of the UK's policy here or its implementation as I'm ignorant. Assuming entrepreneurs won't spring up to arbitrage any system hole they can is naive. Immigration is super-emotive at the best of times especially arbitrarily unfair treatment and those who feel like they're losing from it (rightly or wrongly).
That's the general case being made. Immigration policy is super hard and you kind of have to willfully fortify your compassion as well. More than 700 million people on this planet have no safe drinking water and would want to migrate to any wealthy country under almost any circumstance. Plenty are literally dying to do it. How can we not feel for them? Being compassionate reduces to deciding how many people your country can take easily, with effort, or the level in which society collapses. 700m immigrating in a year will probably achieve collapse.
"What then must we do?"
I haven't got a good answer or indeed a better one than fight corruption everywhere and anywhere under all circumstances.
There is no queue.
I mean that: there is no requirement for cases to be processed in any kind of order, if at all, and nor is there a quota (except in the minds of Home Office managers).
> I get an end run around the immigration system to get healthcare
Hardly anyone does this, or at least there's no evidence of this. If you have money which you wish to trade for healthcare, there are usually better ways than bribing a firm to give you a fake job in the UK?
> Plenty are literally dying to do it.
See Afghanistan.
It was, allegedly, important enough to invade and spend billions on, as well as a number of Westerner lives; however, it is also a policy preference that these people die rather than reach the UK, which puts a rather hard upper bound on what they should have expected from us. This is being played out in real time as the UK decides how many of the people who the Taliban will execute as our collaborators it should allow to be rescued.
(asylum and the refugee system is technically separate from immigration in international law, but this is a distinction few people seem to care about. And this is also separate as nobody should realistically expect an Afghan translator for the British Army to find £650 to save their life)
I wonder how many Afghans we could safely relocate to the Falklands?
Any country that has a number of people who would like to immigrate of whom it will not accept all and will chose who to reject has a queue. How that queue is implemented, orderly, disorderly, corruptly, unjustly, ridiculously, incompetently or at various times all of the above. Some get in, some don't, it's a queue. It may not be a fantasy of an orderly queue where everyone is served in order in good time and without knowing about it, it does not surprise me to hear you say it is emphatically not that. Think of a priority queue if you must with priority being given by a random number generator tempered with both nonsense and corruption. You jump places in the queue by being designated higher priority. Have you jumped forward enough to be accepted and if not what can you do about it - this is the only question for those trying to get in.
Who are you taking vs who are you rejecting? That's if you're already in. You can't take everyone. The world is a nasty place and this is one of the emotional sharp edge of it. You will reject people whose stories break your heart. You don't get a choice about that.
You cannot sensibly call this a "queue". No programmer would accept "random order" when they expected "in order".
Moreover, decisions are independent. The number of people already accepted is not a factor in individual immigration decisions! Someone else getting accepted cannot affect the outcome of your own decision.
> You will reject people whose stories break your heart. You don't get a choice about that.
Why? Who is "you" here? Who's holding a gun to "your" head? You absolutely do get a choice, and moreover if you reject someone who is subsequently killed in the way they warned you about then you, personally - the immigration agent responsible for the decision - are an accomplice in their death.
It's just that this is more apparent when it's the people clearing the runway for the last C130 out of Kabul at gunpoint than when someone's doing it with a pen.
>Why? Who is "you" here?
"You" is anyone putting themselves in the shoes of coming up with an immigration policy. Spare a thought for any decent human being who actually has to get their hands properly dirty and do it. I may not be a decent human because I think I would run from that opportunity without hesitation. I doubt I have the psychological strength to try for a least worse policy that will bring about misery. There is no stroke of my pen where I wouldn't be seeing millions of people dying any one of whom I could have saved with a different stroke. I'm not sure I can live with that. But I can't really absolve myself of the responsibility for what happens as a voting eligible person in a democracy. On that basis I have to at least consider what current policies are and competing ones that might be somehow a little less horrific. They will all be horrific on a personal level in people's lives. A large number of people.
There are 700 million people on this planet who do not have access to safe drinking water. One would think all of them would happily relocate to any wealthy country where their children have a better chance of a reasonable future. The number who would want to relocate to the UK is probably considerably north of that number as you don't have to be on the lowest rung on the ladder of this planet to see the wealth of the UK and think that's worth moving to. There are people with clean drinking water who are utterly desperate. Have any immigration policy at all - imagine your decree is law and implemented with resources and vigor. If the one decided on involves a scale of migration measured in hundreds of millions in a year societal collapse seems very likely. If one accepts that then one embraces the necessity of rejecting worthy people with heartbreaking stories. By the million.
Who to reject? How many to reject? There is no good answer in my opinion. What is your estimate of the number of people on the planet who will die if you reject them? Know they are being rejected. A tiny fraction of utterly desperate people on this planet will be accepted as immigrants in all the rich countries combined.
I say /nothing/ about Afghanistan and refugees. I say literally nothing because I don't know about it. I point out if the immigration policy arrived at is to take everyone from Afghanistan who wants to move and that policy works (hurrah!) and has manageable costs (again hurrah! and again I have no clue), it's not the end of it. There are literally hundreds of millions more people in dire straits for whom moving their family to any rich country would save them. It's f&^king horrible. Every bit as horrible as scenes being televised. This is not an argument I'm making for rejecting any refugees from any country including Afghanistan. As soon as anyone with any kind of heart starts looking at a rich countries immigration policy and its results it is heartbreaking and horrible with no good answers, only ones you hate and loathe slightly less than others. Again this is not an excuse for being as evil as possible or eschewing all compassion or anything of the sort.
"No more horrific than necessary" is a reasonable goal because immigration policy, any policy, whatever it is, will be horrific. It sucks.
It is clear that there is high political prioritization of rejecting as many applications as possible, despite what the criteria actually say and whether the criteria are met. Once people manage to appeal to the real courts, rather than the politically controlled asylum process, most of the decisions are overturned. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/03/inhumane-thr...
The number could be significantly increased by simply taking their own stated rules at face value rather than rejecting valid applications.
I see somebody never used the first iteration of AWS SQS.
> I mean that: there is no requirement for cases to be processed in any kind of order, if at all, and nor is there a quota (except in the minds of Home Office managers).
That's an if-I-close-my-eyes-the-room-will-be-empty way of looking at it. There's a backlog of cases waiting to be processed and a finite processing capacity, so adding more applications is necessarily going to, on average, delay existing (legitimate) applications.
> Hardly anyone does this, or at least there's no evidence of this. If you have money which you wish to trade for healthcare, there are usually better ways than bribing a firm to give you a fake job in the UK?
If there's a loophole that lets someone get NHS healthcare for significantly less than the market price of equivalent healthcare, it seems absurd on its face to imagine that no-one in the world would want to exploit it. Most people are honourable, but there are enough desperate people, and frankly if were that easy then I wouldn't blame them for taking advantage of the system.
> See Afghanistan.
> It was, allegedly, important enough to invade and spend billions on, as well as a number of Westerner lives
Pure whataboutism.
If they all go to the same destination, sure, but there’s no reason to even expect that collective behaviour and plenty of examples to doubt it (most people go short distances, e.g. 80% of the Syrian refugees went to the countries that share a land border with Syria).
Though I absolutely agree with the point that immigration is super-emotive even at the best of times, and likewise I don’t have a good answer to the troubles which cause a need for asylum (very separate in nature from other causes of migration but often blurred together politically) — best I’ve got is seeing that things are getting less bad, so more of what’s currently happening in aggregate is probably good even though we can clearly see specific examples of places and groups where that’s not good enough, like Afghanistan, Syria, Darfur, the Uyghurs, the Rohingya, and the Yazidi.
Though it is kind of dumb.
(Obviously not, that's nonsense, but that's the conclusion that would follow from the false premise of predicating healthcare on length of payments. It's pensions that are dependent on payins of National Insurance.)
> I doubt British people know how bizarre the policies that arose from their voting are either.
I assumed this actually was a consequence of their voting (seems in line with Brexit).
Here's data showing national attitudes towards migrants [1], the UK has consistently one of, if not the most positive view in Europe towards migrants. It's always been a fairly pluralistic place relative to most places on the continent. The notion of reducing migration or having some control over it is fundamentally different that views of migrants themselves, much like there's a big distinction between regular migrants and undocumented migrants, which is sometimes conveniently ignored for political reasons.
The rules for migrants are varied in every country, they are similar on the Continent in many ways where they have their own bits of weirdness.
The Falkland Islands have a population of 3000, which is really, really small. Every 'small nation' especially the really tiny one's are going to have a really peculiar take on basically everything. There's either one person, or not even one person the kinds of jobs for which we take for granted.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/03/14/around-the-wor...
I was surprised because unless I went to the immigration office to prove to them that I either had 'enough' (never really defined) money to support myself, or had a permanent employment contract - I would not have any state coverage for anything (health etc). The UK would of course not support my health care in a different country on a permanent basis. This was within the EU, so free movement and that - so I was indeed surprised, that other countries did something similar within the EU.
> [...] Without prejudice to the dispositions in chapter VII, Union citizens or their family shall never be removed in the following circumstances:
> a) [...]
> b) When the Union citizens entered Portugal to seek employment and they prove that they continue to keep seeking employment.
Chapter VII only says people who joined to country to look for employment are not entitled to social security even after 3 months (which applies across the board).
And when I registered in the Netherlands I don't remember having to provide proof of employment too, though they might have had that information on file. In any case, it was not a permanent contract.
I don't know how important the permanent thing is or if it is tbh. Here it is not possible to claim salary-linked unemployment benefits (which on paper are actually quite generous) unless you have worked for some period of time (6 months or so in some larger period) even if you are as Finnish as can be.
The thing is, there are many 'soft' things that rely on that registration going through, eg. bank account[1], even a local-priced transport pass.
[1]A Finnish bank account here is more than a place to stash money, it's proof of your ID online to any of the nice e-government services.
[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-s...
While true. What’s also interesting is “exploitative” is often through the modern western lens. It’s also a sliding scale where it is quite often seen as a good deal from labor’s perspective. In my previous example, the Filipino’s generally loved the arrangement. They got to travel and send a good deal of money home. It was a highly sought after position from their perspective. My experience is limited to about 10 days in the region and what I heard from American expats, but the hard labor forces also generally liked the arrangement. It offered opportunities that did not exist wherever they immigrated from. It was not without risks as no/low worker safety or OSHA concepts are in effect. Also just what we would consider fair labor practices, just didn’t exist. I’m sure slavery does exist as well because the opportunity is very present.
Exploring this rabbit hole evoked vague memories of Canadians holding British passports until around the time my parents were born.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Canadian_nationalit...
Never saw it. But Wellington, NZ has an accurate copy of the House of Commons for its own Parliament, so at least I saw that.
Maybe that was the case back then but, last I looked, these days you need to write to your local MP to get you on the entry list.
Greece is unique in it's own way - but it's the OG tourist trap in the area.
Coast of Italy isn't really comparable on the Adriatc side (haven't been to Sicily so can't really compare)
And Montenegro is 100x more overdeveloped and touristy. I’m not sure where exactly you are referring to.
Communicating with locals over 30 is a bit challenging unless you know Albanian or Italian (I know, I was surprised too), but it's worth it for the pretty, not overcrowded beaches.
I’m writing this from a small 20 tent only campsite on a Croatian island. Access is only by ferry. Facilities are limited (no large supermarkets for example). It’s our third summer here and while there have been some changes, it is very slow.
Taking a boat out for a day or two also allows for exploration of other, more remote islands. Some bays still aren’t over crowded with boats anchoring for the day.
Also, later in August and early in the week are quieter times. Yesterday, I was the only person swimming at a nice sandy beach at 14:00.
Late spring and early autumn are still gorgeous.
If you rent a boat it can be a bit better, but even then it's a hassle with marinas, etc. Just avoid the peak months IMO.
We did this as well. There were a lot less cars and a lot more children back then. Now it's the opposite.
I think that at some point we'll wake up to the cultural and environmental devastation we've wrought and do something about it. Hopefully it won't be too late by then.
I very much doubt it - one of the reasons we are in this mess is some 80+ years of human capital devastation - we have nowhere to draw experts or leaders from anymore.
You need rich foreign expats, tired of paying 50% of their salaries in exchange for run down cities and homelessness, creating value in the country.
If tourism is your only strategy you won't go far.
Half-Croat here. What you propose would destroy what is left of the country. Public services are already shoddy as it is because Croatia doesn't have much economy outside of tourism, agriculture and a bit of heavy industry. The best and young minds have been leaving the country for well over half a century.
If conditions were more fiscally favourable, if there were better private schools, an english speaking expat community, I'd definitely move there.
I think Montenegro is doing pretty good in that regard. Taxation is straightforward and reasonable. That attracted private capital. Good private schools started popping out, the Tivat marina was built. It's also the first country to be in line to join the EU - which is not something I consider positive, but it's certainly a sign of the quality of the country.
Sadly Croatia is still not there and, frankly, I doubt it's going to get there anytime soon. Croatia is like a poorer version of countries in the EU: high and complex taxes, which get converted into mediocre services after passing through an inefficient government. The only difference is that European countries are richer and therefore the services are marginally better, even if they're getting worse and worse over time.
I understand my anarchist solution can be seen as radical and it's not going to happen, but even moving in that direction would be helpful.
I'm afraid we're talking into a societal, environmental and cultural catastrophe and that nothing will change until it's too late.
Working as a small business freelancer (<1M Euro income/year) gets you around 70% net income (this is with healthcare and minimal retirement plan payments and without accounting and doing stuff like justifying expenses etc. which drives that much further with VAT returns). Public healthcare is inconsistent at best, but there is a healthy industry of medical tourism built for western Europeans that's easily affordable on a normal freelancer income. Likewise private childcare, schools, etc. all available and affordable. And all those beautiful places are still around and nice other 10 months a year. You can easily afford multiple properties and a comfortable lifestyle.
I spent a decent amount of time into looking for alternative places I could live in EU but really nothing looks that interesting, Spain looked attractive until I saw the taxes (and their public system is not worth that kind of money), western Europe is expensive and I would get very minimal increase in income by moving there (programming is not well paid) so I can realistically have a better standard of living here.
If you think things are bad now look at Serbia: sold to China because nobody in the EU cares.
I agree that having a rush of tourists in a country not accustomed to them can cause problems for both the tourists and the locals that resent the sudden influx.
While I complain about it being overcrowded during peak tourist season that's just me reminiscing about the time that I grew up which was during and shortly after the civil war (naturally not a lot of tourism back then and it took years to recover). Any popular tourist place in Europe I've been to has been similar, eg. Dubrovnik is super popular and overcrowded - but so is Venice for example (if not worse).