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Comment by rmbyrro | Hacker News Reader

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".

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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.

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