Any kind of forced population relocation, it's bad. Before, it was done with guns, now it's done with money. The results are the same.
Current day skilled migration is popular today, because companies get fully educated people, without having to pay taxes for education, day care, health. You get only the best, whithout having to paying anything. Not even parental leave for their parents.
The question is, should the people let companies, aka the rich, decide how the country will look like in 50, 100 years?
Also skilled migration is very bad for origin countries too. They loose all the best while having to suport all the liabilities. Like the pensions of the parents of the skilled labor that left and now it's not contributing anything.
The US top 1% are number 1, the US bottom 10% have it worse than most or even almost all people from western Europe.
Look at examples such as Singapore, Dubai and many others that adopted an entrepreneurial attitude and figured out the infrastructure to support that growth.
When will they blame when the immigrants don’t come but the problems remain?
Singapure is a dictatorship fuled by Chinese money, should a NATO country be supported by them? Will the US invade if we sold them the abandoned American base in the Azores?
America’s bottom 10% are absolutely comparable to Europe’s bottom 10% when one considers actual access to services and material standards of living. (I’m assuming you mean EU’s, not Europe’s, because as terrible as being homeless in America may be, it sure beats being bombed.)
It's not comparable, the benefits you get in western Europe are 10x better than what you get anywhere in the USA.
My bad.
> benefits you get in western Europe are 10x better than what you get anywhere in the USA
Benefits you’re entitled to. France, for instance, has put a lot of services behind an internet portal. Add to that the stigma of utilising them in many villages and you get low utilisation rates.
I would imagine the poor in Europe are a bit better off. (If we limit ourselves to the coastal states, the answer may be surprising.)
https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/eligibility/index.html
Over 82,000,000 people are enrolled in Medicaid.
https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medica...
America has lots of programs that assist poor and/or disabled people: SNAP, Unemployment, VA, SSI, SSDI, TANF, Section 8, Childcare Assistance etc. Some people don’t want to bother to apply/jump through hoops to get them but they exist.
IMHO not really
The supply of affordable housing in the place where it's needed often can not be increased due to physical limitations and building luxury flats being more profitable. And the "demand" is often not driven by people living there, but investment stuff.
I.e. if we purely look at "supply of housing" (ignoring price) and "demand of housing" (to live in) there isn't a problem at all in most cases.
Through I agree with NIMBY making it worse, especially given that it's often not even their backyard. But the neighborhood of properties/land bought as investments and them blocking things for investment reasons.
Through the main reason is IMHO still housing being used roughly "like stocks".
Unless you make all existing housing so shitty that local professionals would turn their nose up at it, in which case you have bigger problems
Not building luxury housing at all would only be a solution with domestic mobility restrictions like China
no it doesn't
that would only happen if the demand is based on people who want to move there
but if it is based on interest/dynamics more similar to stock markets like we currently have then there isn't a physical limit on (artificial) demand as such local housing gets bought up first (to potentially be upgraded to luxury flats) and then they still build more luxury flats
Here, the county owns some land that it is going to put 100 houses on. They are going to put houses that cost 3x more than the locals can afford. Why? More money from property tax, and to hell with the average person.
The knock on effect is that regular houses will become more expensive, and in 10 years, only the top 10% of earners will be able to live here.
Like one thing I realized is that it seems that you need to earn way more in the US to have a similar level of living quality/standard compared to the EU. As far as I can tell I probably would need to earn ~50% more to have the same quality of live level in the US compared to where I live now. Through it probably depends a lot on where you are in the US/EU.
Here are two that compare wealth, showing the US 50th percentilers doing significantly better than European ones. US median wealth according to this is $162k: https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b....
And it's hard to get this data for Europe but looking at the "Median" column for this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_distribution_in_Europe it looks like the US middle class would slot into fourth place, just below Denmark which is at 165k, and far ahead of say, Germany, which is at 65k.
like if a lot of skilled workers move over but
- they (mostly/majorly) don't settle, just stay for a few years
- they don't create companies in your country
- they don't work for companies in your country
- the companies they work with might directly compete with your local companies and now with having local representatives can do so better
Then if the tax breaks are worth it is solely a question of taxes they pay + money they spent vs. implicit cost of disruption they cause. Which might not be always worth it.
On the other hand the US doesn't focus on attracting digital nomads, they focus on their biggest/best companies attracting intelligence for themself. Which has a high chance of profiting the US especially given that they also tend to attract young talent which then build their business network in the US making it quite likely that they if they found a company they do so in the US.
I live in a plain Portuguese neighborhood of Porto. There are virtually no foreigners. At least I never see any when walking around or going to a grocery store. I maybe see one a day out of 100s of Portuguese people.
Yet my local Portuguese landlord keeps jacking my rent every year by a huge margin way exceeding the government norms.
Who forces them to do that?
They don’t even live in the city. They live outside in the Douro valley.
It’s just pure greed.
It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. They see average values went up and they adjust accordingly.
And why did the values all of a sudden go up on my neighbourhood with no foreigners?
What you are describing is a second order effect.
It's always, it's relative. Granted, I'm one of these loser EU residents who has a different mindset, that chasing #1 position in terms of GDP generated per resident isn't the be all end all. Instead, people's happiness is on the top of my mind, and taking care of as many people as possible.
And with that mindset, the US is very far from the top, and there are so many countries that are better for "living", but maybe not the best if your entire life revolves around finding the best place for "working".
We all have different focuses in life, and that's OK. But to say that some places are "better" on a absolute scale feels like a mindtrap if anything.
It's not an all or nothing dichotomy.
Social services get dramatically more expensive if you don't have as robust a local economy. All governments borrow money and need to service debts in order to pay for their social safety net, and that's much more expensive now due to higher interest rates and economic convergence.
And it's not like Eastern European EU member states are poor chumps anymore - they're fairly business friendly and some like Czechia have already caught up to Western European (Italy/France) level living standards.
This means you can't play wage arbitrage anymore by getting an underpaid janitor or nurse from Croatia or Poland to work at your local hospital like you could 10 years ago.
In fact the USA is probably the hardest country in the world to work as a digital nomad - you can only work legally here if an employer sponsors you. And you definitely wont get a tax break.
Then it's a tradeoff between whether the extra tax revenue/spending is worth the potential social issues those rich foreigners can bring.
But that’s just one more contributing factor to what you described.
But it's hard to balance with culture and liveability; I would never live in the US for fear of dropping from the few top % by some accident getting into extreme poverty. Here i'm not really scared of that (and i've been there in the distant past).
But if a skilled English speaker wants to move to the Netherlands (whose population is smaller than Florida) or virtually any other European country, they’d have to be fluent in the local language. That’s a really high bar.
Seems like even for multi-lingual Europeans in the EU, this would still be challenging, especially for families. (Asking kids to suddenly attend school in a different language???)
Seems like Europe is the modern day Tower of Babel story.
One example is anecdote, not data, but I know an awful lot of EU and non-EU people both in the big cities and more regional places who landed without any local language and made successful lives and integrated effectively here.
There are harder places to do this but it’s getting easier by the year, especially in the countries that need people who speak other languages for global trade.
Pieter Levels of NomadList fame talks about this often [0][1][2], he is Dutch, not American, so it's not like he's biased for America but he notes that it is disheartening for him to see Europe slip into mediocrity over time.
[0] https://x.com/search?lang=en&q=Europe%20(from%3Alevelsio)&sr...
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
Europe has been mediocre for the entire modern times. France’s Haussmann marks the end of it with the Exposition Universelle of 1889 (Eiffer Tower) which really attracted people. Since then, we had to be rescued by Americans every time we went into war (even in Vietnam) and the art capital of the world is NYC. Maybe De Gaulle revived France a little (and he leveraged the UK/US help for that), but nowhere near what Shanghai or San Francisco did.
Europe is fine as a former success. Happiness has been high, life expectancy too.
Except it is now being ruled over by people who will neither bring it to the sky again, nor will keep the existing inhabitants.
It's easy to talk about highly skilled immigration when you are the one taking all the best part of it. Those highly skilled productive individuals who can move to America will.
Mass import of unskilled migrants, especially young military aged men, is indeed net-negative, unfair and detrimental to the culture and livability.
And yet this is what EU keeps doing to its own detriment.
Yet studies show the opposite of what you so confidently assert.
So we have to be careful when discussing "skilled migration"
That is why they did make that law in the first place.
The problem is what they expected was something like "highly skilled migration contributing directly or indirectly to Portugal".
But that isn't exactly how it played out, which is why they removed tax brakes. I mean think about it. Just attracting talented people to be in your country and paying some tax isn't enough. You also need to be able to capitalize on them. E.g. by them working for your companies, them creating companies in your country, them settling in your country, etc. But AFIK that didn't really happen in case of Portugal.
> any move to attract talent is seen as net-negative,
not really
moves to attract talent are very common, through often focused with different dynamic then the US
through you might confuse the sentiment with the negative sentiment wrt. people coming as refuges instead of immigrants which are often perceived as not being skilled and just taking advantage of social systems etc., the same way it's commonly the case in the US (e.g. wrt. people from Mexico). Just to be clear I say perceived, because enough refuges are quite skilled/qualified just their qualifications are often not recognized due to bureaucratic reasons
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As a side not IMHO/AFIK the huge raise on apartment rent/buy cost in Lisbon is likely _not_ majorly related to the previous tax break programs. Mainly such raises can be observed in most relevant western (and beyond) Capitals around the world, driven by the most wealthy of mainly the western world (but also beyond, e.g. Saudi Arabia) using them as money banks and very term investments. The moment many do it will (did) also drive speculative investment. Which can lead to somewhat of a looping effect. Or in other words it's a side effect of the past ~10 years of (especially western) world economics.
Most EU countries have no issue with skilled migration when needed. Denmark has a solid migration policy and thus relative consensus on keeping it as it is. Other EU countries have passed policies that ruined their own local population in favor of low skill migration or in this case, high skill migrants hoping to avoid high taxes. This not attracting "the best", it's attracted a lot of amoral individuals who just want to move to Lisbon to party and enjoy the weather.
Did you know that more Americans move to Germany than Germans move to America despite lower wages.
Maybe life quality attracts talents more.
(To be honest my comment is very cheeky but so this is the comment above . EU is big . Germany is big and even cities have considerable differences. )
The biggest barrier to attract talent in the EU is language. It's not culture, it's not incentives, it's not tax breaks... it's language. The US only needs to learn a single language, english. For Europe you would need at least 3 languages to be marketable since EU citizens are learning multiple languages since born in most cases.
I’d say most Americans understand the value of highly skilled migration. It’s how America stays #1, it’s how they have the best companies, and bring the most value to their nation.
Meanwhile in EU, any move to attract talent is seen as net-negative, unfair and detrimental to the culture and livability. Their negativity is a self fulfilling prophecy, but it will be a very costly and hard pill to swallow, just like the UK is seeing after Brexit.