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.
It's not hard! We knew how to build a lot of housing on a particular parcel a hundred years ago.
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.
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.
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...
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.
They are looking to expand their maritime territory. They might have a credible claim to it.
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.
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.
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_...
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".
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Whichever country has "good" real-estate prices and golden visa requirements to match will have foreigners buyers.
> It's barely right/left at all, it's just nihilistic power as its own end.
These statements are skillfully leaving out "ethno" part of nationalism. Once you add that quite obviously real and active element back, it's very much a left/right difference.
The left's solution to the problems brought about by globalization is to subtly bias the scales of re-industrialization policies toward the domestic labor market - evidenced by things like the battery materials sourcing and assembly location requirements, and income limits of the recently passed EV tax credits.
The right's solution to this has been playing on fears of a purported invasion by non-white citizens from lower income countries. A decade ago that would have been a controversial claim to make about the right, but today's right openly proclaims those ideas.
Portugal's case is interesting because they lived under a nationalist dictatorship that only ended in 1968, so many people alive today remember living under that. In my travel there, I found that many people in the age groups that vote heavily conservatively in the US and UK instead vote democratic left as a result of their lived memories of nationalist dictatorship.
Portugal does need to figure out what else has to offer the world economically in addition to great weather and beautiful cities and countryside, in order to have a better balance of trade, but it's unrealistic to think it can do that while shutting down immigration.
The underlying grievance is of course not over "increased diversity" per se but rather the long-term decline in civic attitudes. The progressive left expresses the exact same concerns in a different wording, by decrying the increased "marginalization and exclusion" that's seemingly entailed by such diversity. Guess what: they're all looking at pretty much the same thing.
I fail to see how the previous US president's complaints about people coming from "s*hole countries" and the exhortations from the Charlottesville rioters about how "Jews will not replace us" are grievances about "decline in civic attitudes". Try as one may to dissociate them, but these are the faces, words, and animating motivation of nationalism today.
Your argument is intentionally mixing "is" with "was".
Marx died 140 years ago, and there are no ethno-nationalist voices of significance on the left today. In the US context, after the civil rights movement of the 20th century those people left the Democratic party as the parties realigned themselves.
Today it is largely a right wing phenomenon, carrying forward the tradition of right wing ethno-nationalism that persisted from the previous century.
There are also countries like France which only imported cheap and poor labor. France never tried or even discouraged rich people to settle in the country with punitive taxes (compared to our neighbors and other western world countries). For instance London has (or had) rich Russians/Indians/Pakistani investors who made London their residence, not the case for Paris, foreign real estate owners don't take French permanent residency.
And nowadays, we are left with some politicians who promote economic immigration even when there is no need or deny any form of control on illegal immigration mostly to import voters.
Oh, and tax the unimproved value of land and give the proceeds to the Portuguese citizens. This will dampen the effect while supply of housing matches demand.
[1]https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-c...
You can have a relatively affordable city like Montreal and still a lot of homelessness.
The homeless people in my neighbourhood are all crack addicts. They get up and urinate/shit 3ft from where they are standing instead of walking 100ft to the park. They are 'feral'.
If you gave them a 'home' it would immediately be a crack den for them and their buds. The bathroom or anything else would literally never get cleaned ever. It'd fall into disrepair quickly. There'd be no hope of them having any kind of job or anything like that.
The other 1/2 are temporary homeless, usually due to some kind of calamity. Housing prices isn't so much the problem a they need to be 'stabilized'. A 20% shift in rental costs will not affect those people very much.
Low housing costs can positively affect a huge swath of people, freeing up income for other things, but it won't change the number of crackheads on the street and probably not the % of people that 'fall out of the system' for a few weeks.
High housing costs are mostly a strain on working people. w