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Comment by rmbyrro | Hacker News Reader

The Portuguese case is quite different, I think.

Canada has a well-developed and diversified economy. Portugal needs to import a lot from the world, but has very little to offer in exchange.

They found something: their real estate and city center spaces.

The country NEEDS this foreign income. It's not a self-sustainable economy and the world won't work for them for free. If the Portuguese want to solve this issue, one way is to study what else could they develop internally that would be attractive in the world trade market.

Also, foreigners are looking for the European passport, not for Portugal per se. If Portugal were to follow UK's path, demand for their Golden Visa would drop dramatically.

It doesn't benefit the rich, only. By raising real estate prices, it stimulates the construction business, which is labor intensive and has a long supply chain. It benefits the entire economy of the country.

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Portugal should just do what the U.S. and Canada should also do: built more housing: https://slate.com/business/2013/05/exporting-housing-service....

It's not hard! We knew how to build a lot of housing on a particular parcel a hundred years ago.

I remember travelling to Portugal in the early 2000's and our host describing Portugal's national bird as the (construction) crane. Not sure if the pun translates well to other languages. Are they not still doing that?

> The country NEEDS this foreign income.

It's just parking money. It's the last thing a socialist country like Portugal needs, because it screws up the real estate market making housing unafordable to the general population, who lives, works there, pays taxes and maybe has kids. What they can do is tax all property as if one is renting it, like Switzerland does and use the 6 month median rent as the tax base.

If parking money is the problem, I guess an indirect solution would be to give people other places to park their money.

do the people moving there not pay taxes, work there, and raise kids also? I think I'm missing the point. It's simple to solve it by making foreigners pay much higher annual taxes on the privilege to live there and capping real estate prices for locals vs foreigners. Prevent foreigners from actually being able to buy real estate. Then everyone wins.

Not really, they're either retired or buying property to park money, like the rich Chinese are doing in Vancouver and Auckland. The issue is that they already bought real estate and drove the prices up, so now is the perfect time to extract taxes from them.

The Lisbon downtown is cruise ship territory anyhow, I fully understand why a group of youths was protesting against (those kind of) tourists. They treat every city like it's a theme park.

The question in my mind is how can a country like Portugal grow something home grown, industry/economy wise to ameliorate this situation?

Ukraine had traditional industries but it seems like the IT/knowledge worker base they built up over the past 5-10 years seems to be softening some of the economic blows of the war for them, but I can't imaging IT is the answer to every country...

> The question in my mind is how can a country like Portugal grow something home grown, industry/economy wise to ameliorate this situation?

They are looking to expand their maritime territory. They might have a credible claim to it.

Look at Singapore, for example. Its situation was orders of magnitude worse than Portugal decades ago. Now they are probably twice as better.

The key is: stop complaining about "the rich is this, the rich is that" and start thinking about how to be competitive in the 21st century. There are many opportunities, but are Portuguese citizens interested in taking the effort and sacrifice to explore them? The answer to this question is the real explanation for the hard time they're going through, not "rich-blaming".

Singapore's public housing is propped up by the fact that they have a huge proportion of their population that are totally ineligible for it, but pay the taxes to support it. I think something like only 60% of Singapore has the citizenship or correct criteria of permanent residency to obtain public housing.

If the US can put 40% of its working populace into some lower-rights having class, like strip their citizenship, we would have a comparable public housing tax base.

I'm not talking about how real estate works there, but how they became a sophisticated and highly competitive economy in a few decades.

May want to go back and delete your comments about real estate then. Honestly without exploiting foreigners to subsidize their housing, these tag line here would probably just as likely be "Singaporeans Can No Longer Afford to Live in Singapore."

If you live in an advanced urban economy, with relatively open borders and free market real estate, you have to get with the program or get forced out. You can argue that's a good thing, or a bad thing.

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>Why is this exploitation? The country is offering a lot of positive things to foreigner

Pretty unsophisticated logic here. The idea that something good was obtained, therefore a policy can't be exploitive, is on face absolutely an unfounded and absurd claim.

Are foreigners kept there against their will?

I bet they're happy to live there, despite the housing costs.

Why is this exploitation? The country is offering a lot of positive things to foreigners. I'd love to have a Singaporean passport and be able to live there if I could afford.

May want to keep your comment deletion considerations to yourself.

The situation in Singapore is different. The foreigners are not high-income people who chose to live there. Only about 28% are skilled labor. The foreigners _may_ be happy to live there but I wouldn't make that assumption without checking. Just because it's better than their alternative doesn't mean it's good, or even acceptable.

Source:

> [immigrants population is] 1.23 million, out of which about 351 thousand were classified as skilled labor. Most of the foreign workforce [...is employed...] in construction and the service industry, or as domestic help.

-- https://www.statista.com/statistics/698035/singapore-number-...

> If the US can put 40% of its working populace into some lower-rights having class, like strip their citizenship, we would have a comparable public housing tax base.

The US is already working on this, albeit unintentionally.

Undocumented immigrants were at 3.3% of the population in 2016 and the numbers have absolutely exploded since the beginning of the Biden administration, with 2 million apprehensions so far for in 2022 [0]. The cumulative effect of this over just a single term of the Biden administration will completely reshape the demographics of most of the border states (and most major cities of the country), as the majority of immigrants are arriving with very little means, extremely limited ability to speak English, and will be mostly restricted from accessing the US financial system without legal residence status, hobbling them financially and forcing them into informal work arrangements.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/illegal-immigration-arrests-hit...

Undocumented immigrants tend to be an overall good for the citizen economy since we can exploit them, charge them sales tax etc, and then not offer them public services in return. Hopefully the cheap construction labor will improve the housing situation in the US.

Undocumented immigrants have the same access to public services such as public education, medical care at hospitals, access to court systems, police, fire, etc.

Undocumented immigrants have access to the court system and police that will arrest them the moment they are found to be undocumented? Even if they ostensibly could use it they would avoid taking the risk

This point is about 20 years out of date and is no longer true in most of the country. Most local police, aside from border states, will not inquire about immigration status when dealing with the general population and many larger cities actually refuse to cooperate with ICE immigration detainers on inmates in their local jails for non-violent offenders.

And yet ICE hangs around those locations and even goes as far as to deport people they had a court order to not deport. That chilling effect would make undocumented immigrants avoid authorities unless you believe they are irrational.

I hate to be that guy but do you have a source on undocumented immigrants availing themselves of the legal system en masse in the US?

A record number of arrests can mean there is a record number of immigrants but does not guarantee that is the cause. Increased enforcement of the border would also lead to higher arrests and subsequently reduce the inflow of immigration

The current administration has gone back and forth on this. Initially the policy was to be as "Un-Trumpy" as possible on border policy, but that had the predictable effect of encouraging more illegal immigration simply by changing the narrative in the source countries. Now they've quietly restarted a fair amount of border wall construction but their options for solving it logistically are very limited, as the only way to address the massive influx is to rapidly scale the personnel on the border which can't be done overnight (unless the National Guard is used, which would be completely rejected by the liberal base).

If you're interested in unfiltered perspectives, I would encourage you to focus on articles that specifically quote active Border Patrol agents who are working on the border. It's quite different than anything you hear from Washington DC.

I have spoken extensively with Border Patrol agents. While they were faking dog alerts, detaining me for 16+ hours, strip searching me, writing obscenely vulgur and false statements about the intimate parts of my body, and sharing it with judges and even the united states assistant attorney, cuffing and shackling me and driving me to multiple hospitals across my state for "internal examination" while doctors refused to respect my declining of consent, even though (for the first 12 hours) they had no warrant or legal mechanism to perform "medical care." While they were tossing me in jail cells, full of people I can't speak to, without being charged with any crime. While they made me perform my bodily functions in front of them, and they searched through the effects found thereafter. While they were fingerprinting / booking me without even being accused of a crime, nor arrested (which is normally only reserved for non-citizens).

They degraded me in almost every way possible, except penetrating me, and one other lady who they dragged to the same hospital as me wasn't even that lucky. Fuck em. Oh yes, I'm a US citizen (who looks white, middle class, speaks fluent hick english, normal), with an unquestionably valid passport who has never broken any border related law, and they never found anything. I would rather 100 illegals get through than any other single person be treated the way I have by border patrol. Border Patrol is a criminal organization, depriving rights under color of law and should be prosecuted under the RICO act.

MAGAs are blaming this on Biden rather than on deteriorating political situations all through Mexico, Central, and South America lol. It's a lot easier to blame the president tho.

Not a MAGA so I can't speak for them, but the "root causes" angle is really just a dead end talking point to deflect and allow inaction on this issue.

As long as salaries in the US are double, triple, or more than people can make in their home countries, there will always be more economic migrants than the US system can accommodate. It's a very simple case of supply and demand. No "root causes" strategy is going to change anything about the situation facing destitute, rural laborers in the Northern Triangle countries in the next 5-10 years. It will always make economic sense for them to attempt to immigrate to the US. The only thing that will stop them is a significant deterrence policy from the US government.

Your logic doesn't hold any water. The pay gap has existed for decades. The reason they're coming now is because their countries are falling apart and they have no stability at all in their lives. That is what has been getting worse for them. Money is great but food, shelter, and safety are far more important, even to the most extreme capitalists.

I think maintaining distinctiveness as a country is the best possible economic security, instead of turning it into an airport mall of fast food chains and crappy condos. France has maintained this somewhat, but not without a lot of struggle. Globalized chains create a radical monopoly in the cities they are in because they reduce the amount of risk/reward for local entrepreneurs, and require high amounts of capital to start. It's why downtown SF is such a cultural desert of basic and Times Square is just a theme park to itself. The policies that encourage globalized businesses create a homogenization that makes the desirable diversity that emerges organically impossible.

Portugal could impose a foreign buyers tax, use it's egalitarian/socialistic political culture to incentivise some small-n natalism, and leverage the unbelievable cultural resources it has as somewhere that is a respite from the blob of tourists that it has allowed to imbalance its economy.

It's not so much IT that would change the economy, but honestly - math. It's the only real social advantage that a country can organize to leverage, and the next country that triples down on its math education investment is going to be the next power base. Given what I've seen there that the article captures perfectly, it's probably their only hope.

Unfortunately education in Portugal is one of the worst in Europe. It would need a massive investment with a visionary direction to start to see results 15 years later. 4-year terms do not lend themselves well to long-term national projects like that.

Ironically, excellent education might be one of the most positive legacies the Communist regimes left to Eastern European countries, and part of why countries like Estonia or Poland will be better poised in the near future.

Incorrect. Education in Portugal was one of the worst in Europe.

Portugal is the only country in the OECD that has consistently risen in PISA scores since their inception in 2000.

Portugal was bottom of the table in 2000, and now it's at middle. Not the best, but not the worst either.

Source: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-59031-4_...

It's not just Ukraine. Central and Eastern Europe in general has seen plenty of sustained growth. You just need the right policy attitude for it, which has historically been quite problematic in places like Portugal (see "The incredible shrinking Portuguese firm" for one especially clear example).

Portuguese IT is pretty good in general, and that could easily have been part of the solution. The problem is that there was a large exodus of talent in the early 2010s (including yours truly), and that has caused some serious brain drain.

I remember Passos Coelho suggesting that the young will need to emigrate for work, circa the time of the crisis/austerity.

Yup. So I did.

The company I work for has 3 devs in Portugal, working remotely... good people, very skilled, and it's much more affordable to pay them well compared to their local market than trying to hire locally, even if locally (more expensive European country), salaries are still a far cry from those of the USA, let alone Silicon Valley. With remote becoming widespread, it's hard to believe Silicon Valley is still willing to pay so much more money for devs than hire remote workers in Portugal and numerous other countries with high education and infrastructure, but much, much lower salaries.

> With remote becoming widespread, it's hard to believe Silicon Valley is still willing to pay so much more money for devs than hire remote workers in Portugal and numerous other countries with high education and infrastructure, but much, much lower salaries.

In the US there are 50 states to choose from for remote workers. And then outside that is the rest of North/South America all within a narrow time zone band.

Good drug policy, car-less urbanity, and a good tech scene. With California weather and 1/5 the cost? Sounds great. When can I move?

They could start building housing

I read somewhere that there was a raise in bicycle factories in Portugal. Some euro companies are attractee by the idea of being able to put a made/assembled in europe label while keeping labour cost low, avoid asian supply issues and portugal provides that.

>By raising real estate prices, it stimulates the construction business, which is labor intensive and has a long supply chain. It benefits the entire economy of the country.

Maybe, but only if the increase in wages paid keeps up with the rising rents. And remember that in unregulated capitalism, most of the income from increased economic activity is captured by the wealthiest tiers, with only negligible increases for the vast majority. The rising tide indeed raises all boats, but it raises some boats far more than most. If rent rises 10% but median wages rise only 2%, most people will be losing ground, not gaining.

I disagree, Portugal does offer something interesting:

Cheap labor.

In fact, some of the cheapest in the EU - both qualified and non. It even can be said that the current Portuguese Economic Model is intra-EU salary dumping.

(and a lot of rent-seeking)

Instead of selling their land, they can lease it, with a heavy tax on top.

Foreigners buying land there are because it gives them a path to European passport or at very least nearly instant permanent residency. Not because they want to live in Portugal. Portugal requirement is "just" €280,000 which is extremely low - their neighbor's, Spain, requirement is €500,000.

Whichever country has "good" real-estate prices and golden visa requirements to match will have foreigners buyers.

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