Or, if you take another section of the rest of the world wait till you realize what's happening in the rest of the world where people work less hard and don't have it that bad.

That is a much smaller slice of the world than the opposite.

Even the poor in the U.S. are still better off than most people in the rest of the world. The U.S. can certainly do better addressing income inequality, but there still needs to be some perspective as to the relative opportunity available to people in the U.S. compared to most other places.

Then hopefully immigrants are also going there and enjoying that system, if it supports them, wherever it may be.

FYI a great many immigrants were rich when they immigrated. A lot of rich people come to America because America offers so much opportunity to people who are already wealthy. Immigrants from overseas are especially likely to be wealthy. Indian-Americans are the wealthiest ethnic demographic in America simply because migrating from India pretty much requires being very wealthy to begin with.

Nothing I said indicated the immigrants were rich or poor, the majority are poor though.

My point was if there's a nicer system than the US, immigrants will be flocking there too.

Luckily we have numbers on the rates of which people immigrate to which countries, and the average wages of citizens of those countries.

> Indian-Americans are the richest ethnic minority in America because migrating from India pretty much requires being wealthy.

Plenty of lower class Indian immigrants pool their money for taxi medallions, convenient stores, hotels, trucks, etc. to get a business going.

They integrate well and know how to climb the system. They send their children in as doctors later in generations. They don't always start rich, they work for it.

> A lot of rich people come to America because America treats rich people so well, at the cost of treating poor people like dirt. See: tax rates.

You'll find tax rates are better in the US than most other countries for lower income families. For businesses the US has only recently been competitive.

> Plenty of lower class Indian immigrants pool their money for taxi medallions, convenient stores, hotels, trucks, etc. to get a business going.

Are there many "lower class Indian immigrants" who arrived in the past 30 years? The immigration system since the 90s has raised the barrier for Indians so high that the idea of 'lower class Indian immigrants' seems difficult to parse. I disagree with the assertion that Indians have to be very wealthy to immigrate - highly educated/qualified, yes. The era when an Indian taxi driver could immigrate ended many decades ago.

Yes. There are many lower class immigrants period and there's many jobs in which they work.

Uber driving, trucking, convenient stores, and many more.

I'm genuinely curious how this is the case. Every desi person I see working in the jobs you mentioned has usually turned out to be Bangladeshi or Pakistani - For every Indian Uber driver, I've gotten 5 Pakistani ones. I'm in NYC, which has a large South Asian population. The city is quite tolerant of undocumented immigrants, so I'd expect undocumented Indians to occupy some significant fraction of those jobs as well. Yet even Indian restaurants here are mostly staffed by Bangladeshis.

As I understand, lower class/cast Indians have to win a lottery to get a decent education.

What? That's not the case at all. Like anywhere in the world, education in India is definitely more accessible to the privileged. However, the Indian educational system has a mandatory quota for the traditionally marginalized groups, and higher education is essentially free. Yes, there are issues around accessibility to education for the most disadvantaged groups, but to suggest that a "lower caste" Indian needs to win a lottery (whatever that means) to get a decent education is just not true. The current system reserves about 50% of educational seats at the very best institutions for various marginalized groups (including the differently abled). A kid from a marginalized group that has at least average grades is almost guaranteed a college education, for free. A bright kid from one of these groups is very likely to get into the very best engineering/medical/research institutions. Of course, it not all smooth sailing after that, and discrimination is a real problem. I would still disagree that the chances for a decent education are anywhere comparable to winning a lottery.

> They integrate well and know how to climb the system. They send their children in as doctors later in generations. They don't always start rich, they work for it.

And from this article, we can see Ecuadorians follow a similar path. The integrate well, and climb the system by sending their sons and daughters to college where they can build a better life for themselves than their parents had.

> Indian-Americans are the wealthiest ethnic demographic in America simply because migrating from India pretty much requires being very wealthy to begin with.

Most Indian immigrants come from middle class, not poor or rich backgrounds. They are privileged enough to have access to educational opportunities that give them the skills to emigrate, but privileged enough to not have a reason to emigrate.

"It's worse somewhere else" isn't relevant to whether it's acceptable in the US.

The US has the resources to reward hard workers with financial stability. It also benefits from brain-draining other countries with this promise.

If the US continues to slide away from the "American Dream," the brains and prosperity will end up somewhere else.

So how much do you want to pay for bottle collecting? When you say "the US has the resources to reward hard workers", in this case you mean everybody who buys a bottle should pay more. Or how would you envision it to play out?

We could easily turn bottle-collecting into a job with guaranteed hours and pay.

Bottle-collecting is a poor example for the broader issue I was discussing. Those programs are intended for the (mostly homeless) poor to pick up trash they see instead of leaving it behind. It does what it's supposed to do.

Many places use a deposit system, where if you return the packaging for recycling, you get your money back. This cuts down on litter, at no cost to those who recycle.

But presumably, the higher the price for returning bottles, the less likely people will be to just dump them on the street, for the collectors to collect?

Or it will become attractive for more collectors. In any case, it may not be so simple to raise their "wage" for collecting bottles.

Many people will dump on the street (or in cans the collectors tend to) even if the deposit tripled.

> The US has the resources to reward hard workers with financial stability.

Most hard workers in the U.S. are rewarded with financial stability. Not everyone, but enough that people still flock here from other countries where that's less true.

> It also benefits from brain-draining other countries with this promise.

Well gee, I guess the U.S. should stop being such a great place for immigrants, so talented people stop coming here and stay wherever they live now.

> Most hard workers in the U.S. are rewarded with financial stability. Not everyone, but enough that people still flock here from other countries where that's less true.

You think restaurant workers are lazy? Factory workers? Amazon fulfillment workers?

Why do people need two or three exhausting jobs to make a living?

> Well gee, I guess the U.S. should stop being such a great place for immigrants, so talented people stop coming here and stay wherever they live now.

I don't know what this means. Have the courage to say what you mean instead of using sarcasm.

Whatever you mean, the US needs young workers to resolve our massive labor shortage and we need educated workers to be our next generation of scientists, doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

> Why do people need two or three exhausting jobs to make a living?

Most. Not all. The U.S. can still do better, but there needs to be some perspective on how the U.S. stacks up against the rest of the world. Better than most countries, not as good as some.

> Whatever you mean, the US needs young workers to resolve our massive labor shortage and we need educated workers to be our next generation of scientists, doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

Brain drain sounded to me like the U.S. attracting those people is a bad thing, because those people should stay in their own countries. That's not what you meant to imply?

We do need educated workers to fill the jobs you describe, but at the same time we probably send too many young people to college, many of whom would do better with solid technical skills training leading directly to jobs with far less debt.

From a US perspective, braining other countries' brains is good. I understand the term is negative, but I didn't mean it that way.

We don't need to ask how the US stacks up against the rest of the world -- only our economic peers. Compared to many Western European countries and Canada, we are not investing our excess resources as well into social safety.

I'm not a socialist and don't support UBS, but the floor of poverty in the US needs to be much higher (for all our sakes).

> where people work much harder and still don't get by.

This happens to a lot of people in the US, as well.

That's classic whataboutism. That doesn't explain away why it's that bad in the US nor does it justify accepting the status quo.