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It turns out Greenland/Denmark and Canada aren't the only friendly countries that the US has been threatening, the Vatican's ambassador to the US (according to The Free Press and Letters from Leo a Catholic focused blog) was given both explicit and coded threats of military force against the Holy See.
JD Vance, a Catholic himself, has done a pretty rare thing for the Trump admin and said they're gonna get to the bottom of it first, instead of immediately dismissing it as fake news.. This doesn't confirm it as real, but that it wasn't immediately denied and dismissed like the typical M.O. is quite interesting.
This could help explain why Pope Leo has felt so emboldened to speak up against Trump's war efforts in Iran, cause the administration officials have been warmongering against them behind the scenes. The chance that the admin actually pulls the trigger and attacks the Vatican is obviously low, but that they keep threatening many of our allies both publically and privately seems quite concerning to me. It also opens up a new thing to consider, how many other allies are they threatening behind closed doors too?
The Pope planning to spend the 250th anniversary of the USA in the completely irrelevant island named Lampedusa (yeah we get the pun Leo), known solely for importing Africans into Europe, reminds me why I ultimately have to hate Catholicism. This is a serious insult to an entire country over a political dispute involving a transient administration. And never would an Italian pope consider missing an important political anniversary in Italy. If Catholicism continues supporting endless migration into America and Europe then I will support any effort to shatter them into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the winds. There’s a generous middle-ground between “not supporting the destruction of an alien civilization” and “bringing literally infinite aliens into your country”, I don’t know how they could get this so wrong.
(Just reasoning from love thy neighbor: the Hispanic laborer who works in America has the privilege of sending home remittances with significantly greater purchasing power. Due to average salary difference adjusted for USD, cost of living difference and purchasing power difference, the Hispanic laborer could effectively make 10x more than his American counterpart. This allows him to easily support a family back home, which according to God’s design is a key factor for happiness, but the poor American laborer does not have this same privilege. Even the poor Indian who migrates here to work at a gas station has greater odds of supporting a family due to the status / wellbeing differential between here and India. We oppress our poorest neighbor by forcing him to compete with foreign workers when he makes significantly less in two key ways: (1) he often makes far less in terms of purchasing potentials re Latin America, (2) he makes far less in terms of marital potential re all foreign migrants. Same amount of stressful work, but significantly different payoff for wellbeing. Seems evil to me.)
The Pope has no allegiance to any specific country, since he's...the Pope. Why the fuck should he be present or make a formal appearance for America's birthday party? Do you understand what the Papacy is? I'm unsure, since you're literally expecting the Pope to express a national preference. Do you think Pope Benedict was hanging out in the German Reichstag to celebrate the anniversary of Reunification?
I'm assuming this is news to you, but Lampedusa is an infamous island since it's been a major receptacle for illegal migrant boat crossings long before the 2015 Refugee Crisis began. It was constantly in the news here in Europe for not having the logistical ability to properly house and feed the throngs of migrants arriving there. The word "Lampedusa" used to act as a byword for illegal immigration into Europe and still is an emblem of the migrant crisis, especially in Italy - leftists and the Papacy see it as an example of unjust human suffering and indignity, while right-wingers see it as a cautionary tale of mass migration. For you to call it a "completely irrelevant island" immediately classifies you as lacking the basic insight to have much of a meaningful opinion on this matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampedusa_immigrant_reception_center
You heard that the Pope would be in Lampedusa and actually, sincerely thought he was doing so because the last three letters of the island's name spell out "usa"? This is something you actually think is true? Are you ok?
I actually agree - as a Catholic - that the Pope's knee-jerk defence of any and all immigration is wrong, misguided, and ultimately a very narrow reading of Christian doctrine on the matter. But this kind of completely braindead reasoning does us no favours.
Was Leo even invited? Is there a guest list of foreign dignitaries available? Has Charles III been invited, for one, or will Duchess Meghan do in his stead?
EDIT: Seems like Chuck and Camilla will turn up in the USA for the bash!
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Lampedusa is entirely irrelevant except for African migrants. It’s a tiny island with less than 7k inhabitants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lampedusa
Yes, exactly what I said. African economic migrants, mostly Muslim, mostly military aged males. Great priority for a Pope, to promote the destruction of Europe even as Catholicism dies in Europe.
You aren’t familiar with the history and practice of Catholic wordplay. You can start with the famous etymologies of Isidore of Seville: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymologiae (pro-tip: the etymologies are not real). It is no coincidence that on America’s 250th anniversary, the institution which supports the replacement of Americans with Hispanic Catholics and protested their deportations, and which pretends to act as a light unto the nations, is visiting Lampedusa the African migrant island known solely for importing Africans into Europe.
Do you know how frequently popes visit this island? Do you know the last time was 13 years ago? Do you think it’s a coincidence that Leo chose to visit on the 250th anniversary of America, after spending all year crying about deportations because his dying institition requires a perpetual supply of Latin Americans (else they have to sell off their churches to the very Muslim migrants whom they supported coming in)?
I have absolutely no idea why you think the size of the local population has any bearing on the importance of Lampedusa when the island itself is considered a symbol of the Refugee/Migrant Crisis - which is of course a highly relevant issue for the West and the Third World. Furthermore, if big numbers are what determines relevancy to you in a symbolic gesture, consider that since 2023 alone, over 120.000 migrants have passed through Lampedusa on their way to Europe - it's literally the biggest migrant reception camp in Italy, a nation at the forefront of illegal migrant arrivals. As an individual migrant center, its quite literally the most relevant in Europe after Moria in Greece.
https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/62189/italy-more-than-120000-migrants-passed-through-lampedusa-since-2023#:~:text=From%20June%201%2C%202023%20until,Cross%2C%20who%20manage%20the%20center.
So is it an irrelevant island, or a springboard for the total destruction of Europe? It can't be both.
I agree with you that this immigration is bad and stopping it is an existential priority, but this kind of incoherence is pointless - either we are talking about the Papacy's stance on immigration, in which case we're probably on the same side, or we're talking about the implications of the Pope not attending America's 250th anniversary, but you can't just jump back and forth between two separate conversations.
You literally said "we get the pun, Leo" - the only way to interpret this is that you mean the "pun" is Lampedusa including the letters "usa" in its spelling. I think sincerely believing that the Pope chose this location based on this "pun" is ridiculous and unserious, since once again, Lampedusa is infamous and has been a byword for mass migration since over 20 years.
Considering that the last time a Pope visited my hometown Vienna - a historic centre of Catholic Power and the symbolic seat of Christendom's victories against the islamic Turkish invasions - was 19 years ago, I don't consider 13 years long or rare by any means.
I still don't understand why you expect the Pope to appear at a state event commemorating a national independence day. Your entire argument hinges on Pope Leo slighting Trump by not attending - when Popes just simply do not do that in the modern age. John Paul the IInd was a proactive right-wing Pope, but even his role in world politics was organised under very clear theological lines: Communist states oppressed the Church and Christians as a matter of state policy, so obviously he was completely within reason to speak out against them as the Spiritual Leader of said Christians. Pope Leo being critical of Trumps immigration policy is easily defendable by Christian doctrine, even if I could maybe come up with better counter-arguments.
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Why are you so butthurt about a guy who represents, in your own words, an irrelevant dying organistion not turning up to some one of the events that are going on for a full year? This is like a guy spending the entire evening telling his friends that he is totally over that bitch, he never thinks of her anymore, ex-who? and anyway who is this new guy she's hanging out with, does she think that loser is better than him, she'll never find anyone as good as he was, but okay there's loads of chicks who will snap him up once they know he's back on the market, just wait and see.
Let it go, mate. Let it go.
I am otherwise fond of everything Leo has said, fyi. It’s just that the migrant / deportation issues are cataclysmically bad in the longrun for what I value.
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Not really. Do you really think that a Harris-voting Catholic would feel that the pope declining celebrating the anniversary with Trump would be an insult?
If you show up in any serious meeting dressed up as a clown, it is unlikely that people will take you serious. And whining about how your clothes are merely transient and they should respect you as the person you are underneath them is not going to convince anyone.
I am an atheist, but it seems to me that modern Catholicism -- for all its faults -- still contains some nugget of the ideas of Christ, while the religion loudly preached by the Trump administration -- Hegseth first and foremost -- would work equally well if you placed Mars, Odin, or any tribal deity as the figurehead instead.
If Trump meets with the pope either 1) in a clown suit or 2) making jokes about Allah and destroying civilization. you may have a point.
It isn't "if someone called you a clown sometime, someplace in the world, people won't take you seriously".
You might not be aware of it, but Trump frequently posts on social media. I would say he comes off as unhinged. He is not wearing the clown suit, he is the clown suit the US is currently wearing.
Anyone who is pretending that his behavior is normal presidential behavior is just enabling him at this point, and I can totally see why the pope would prefer not to do that.
I agree that the Allah thing was a joke (though not an especially funny one, to my tastes), but the thing about destroying Iranian civilization was a threat. A threat which none of the other presidents in my lifetime would have made. The fact that hours later he chickened out and decided that the peace plan offered by Iran was a good enough basis for a ceasefire does not change this.
Trump behaves that way because behaving politely does no good whatsoever. It doesn't prevent attacks and it doesn't prevent people from doing all they can to snub you if you're a Republican. The Pope would not act the least bit differently if Trump were polite but kept the same policies.
If it's a threat in the way you think it is, it's a threat that was taken back in the next sentence.
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(1) This is why Americanism is a heresy (2) Those who hate the Church only have hatred, they don't have reasons. So you hate the entire theology of a Christian denomination based on geography? Yeah, that's reasonable. You would hate us anyway, because we still try not to go the route of some American home-grown denominations where the national flag gets pride of place in the sanctuary but people would fall down in fits at the very notion of a crucifix.
We are not Caesaro-papist and we do not exist merely to prop up national vanity of any empire or country. We are responsible ultimately and solely to this authority.
Your first link brings up an interesting question for me when it says the Irish controlled the Church in America. Why is this? All the Catholic Colleges in America seem to be Irish dominant. Maybe I am forgetting some colleges. I am likely solving my own question but it’s still an interesting question.
Counters: Italians controlled more cultural and educational capital in the old world.
St John’s is the only Catholic school of note that the AI is telling me is Italian dominated though still founded by the French.
I think English-speaking, unlike other European Catholic immigrants, and had an advantage by getting into power and clinging on to it in the face of organised opposition. See Tammany Hall. This meant an alliance between the clergy and the secular powers, to protect rights of the Irish against that opposition and broader anti-Catholicism in society (see Dagger John Hughes):
There was also a heavy emphasis on integrating into mainstream American society, to show that you were 'as good as the rest of them' and that was easier for the Irish since they didn't stand out like the Italians, Poles, etc. The Germans had a lot of trouble due to the First World War and were forced to integrate, such force didn't have to be applied to the Irish:
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It doesn't, and there's no reasonable basis to say that it does.
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It's all good, playboy.
We can thug it out however you want.
Like the song says:
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My understanding is that marital prospects for the median Indian guy are pretty dire, actually.
Incidentally, do you think Americans moving to lower cost of living places (which has a negative impact on the economy and housing for locals) is evil? How about American "passport bros" going to poor countries where their American dollars (and US passport) allows them to outcompete local men?
As an anecdote, I was talking to my sister the other day about some work her friend is doing. She (the friend) is studying the effects of education on social mobility among women in India, and apparently because of the increasing gender gaps in India in terms of educational attainment, it's becoming increasingly common to see new strange reverse-dowry arrangements. Because girls are so routinely outperforming boys in school, parents will for the purpose of an arranged marriage of their failson to someone else's smart daughter, pay for the foreign education of that girl in the hopes that the boy will be able to emigrate with her and work in a higher-earning (ideally western) countrey.
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A first-generation Indian will trivially find a partner back in India, this is what many first-gen Indians who move here or in Canada do.
It would be a good idea for the locals of that country to protest unless they are inevitably prevented from living in their own cities. It is not evil to to take advantage of something legal, it is evil to harm the poor in your own nation through pernicious immigration policies.
Well it’s certainly not a preferable outcome. And I imagine it harms dating in the subject country. But that’s a lot different than what we’re talking about.
Do you find gentrification harmful as well? Looking back at my recent post about Lawrenceville, in 2000 it was a working-class to lower class area with an average home sale price of around $25,000. At the same time, a house in a good suburb like Bethel Park would cost over $100,000. These days, the average sale price in Lawrenceville is over $400,000 while Bethel Park is around $300,000. Bethel Park hasn't changes much over that time period but Lawrenceville certainly has.
I think there’s an argument to be made that Portland Oregon briefly had one of the highest qualifies of life for young Americans before gentrification (and before the migration of crazy people — a separate matter). There are certainly cases where gentrification is harmful. But while we can secure the interests of the poor by simply saying “close the migrant floodgates”, handling something like gentrification within national borders is more complicated… But ideally you do want your cities to be overflowing with young adults who can afford rent and have extra time on their hands, as this promotes art / culture / etc. Are American remote workers doing this in Mexico City? Perhaps not. Maybe they insufficiently participate in the local economy.
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Housing, maybe in the short term (it's at least intuitive), but the economy? Is there any strong evidence for that?
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I like seeing the most incredibly leftist stereotypes imaginable coming from the nominal right simply by adding "foreign" or "immigrant" with it. The traditional (actual) conservative view of people like Reagan and Thatcher understood that growth is the rising tide that floats the boats for everyone, instead of constant regulation put to "protect" the poor. We oppress our poorest neighbors not by "forcing him to compete" but by sabotaging the market efficiency of our companies and slowing improvements.
It's the exact sort of thinking as an example that had blue states "protecting" taxi cab drivers from rideshare apps, slowing down the spread and hurting all the people who benefited from their use. The tradeoffs of neutered growth is that all the people who would benefit from it don't, and those people are disproportionately the poor who wouldn't have had any access before. A very poor person might have rarely ever taken a taxi long ago, the price being artificially restricted from competition (like taxi medallions) and instead end up stuck on public transit. Now it is so accessible to the poor that they're even ordering private taxis for groceries and restaurant food. It is not restriction, but growth that has allowed even the poorest Americans access.
Take this to almost anything and you see the same story. Whether it be from immigrant work, outsourcing, or automation, it helps the poor when the economy is grown. Factories allow poorer people to own cars. Developments like automated switchboards make phone bills cheaper. Laborers building homes help drive down rent (even if cities insist on restricting new homes and flooding the dam). You don't spend almost 15% of your income on clothing anymore because of growth. You've flown in a plane because of growth. You have a smartphone because of growth. You have cheap lighting in your homes because of growth. I can call a friend of mine all the way over in the UK for pennies because of growth. Do you wish to deny the poor all of this and all future things to come? If not, be pro growth and fight for efficiency in growing the economy, not temporary rent seeking "pro worker" progressiveism.
Frankly, I think the bigger problem is that the immigrants don’t share the same civic value and frequently benefit from government largesse.
So on the one hand they help destroy the fabric that makes growth possible and on the other hand a not insignificant portion take more than they give (eg Somalians)
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In real life, when you restrict the labor supply then quality of life and technology improves: https://history.wustl.edu/news/how-black-death-made-life-better . And when you saturate the labor pool, wages for the poorest drop: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/wage-impact-marielitos-reappraisal-0
China has genuine technological growth far exceeding ours without saturating their labor pool with new workers. Europe has little technological growth despite saturating their labor pool with new workers.
American Uber drivers would be making a killing if it weren’t for mass migration.
I’m feeling strange deja vu…have we had this argument before?
Both of those articles support the common economic wisdom that, ceteris paribus, competition lowers prices. This is not sufficient to show a quality of life improvement or to demonstrate technological advances. You lose out on specialization of labor. You have to give up coordination problems. There is less economic slack to search for more efficient investments.
China absolutely flooded its labor pool with cheap immigrants. This has been widely regarded as a bad move.
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If you're trying to make an argument for restricting the labor supply, don't pick a country with over a billion people as an example of how to do things, especially if most of those people were poor peasants a generation ago.
China has more innovation than Europe even controlling for their population. Sizably so.
I think Rov's point is that China has such a huge population to start with that even now that they're "controlling" it, they're best analogized to "what if we had a much bigger labor pool here in the US" than "what if we shrunk our labor pool too".
I’m not sure why it would work like this. If we consider it all per capita, shouldn’t China need an even larger pool of laborers given their manufacturing and mining sectors? But they’re getting away with far fewer laborers per capita while sustaining an absolutely dominant domestic industry. And their wages are continually rising across income levels!
https://old.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/142c9t2/manufacturing_wages_in_china_have_risen/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/743509/china-average-yearly-wages-in-manufacturing/?srsltid=AfmBOooSJ4r5rbVOvysJpCOwmvC_KqezPi__XLD0kqBb7HReoqDmUww7
What you're seeing is that China was very poor and the rural areas of china were desperately poor. It's like if the US already had most of south america as states so that almost all of the economic immigration didn't count as immigration.
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Yes labor shortages in the short term can be quite beneficial to workers at the time, but what do labor shortages actually mean for the economy and the world? Things that people want or need to be done, don't get done because there's no one around to do them. People have to shift their labor away from awesome but not strictly necessary things like developing cars, phones, rocket ships, televisions, new medicine, whatever else in favor of the essentials. This means those new things don't happen (or at least happen much later), hurting everyone in the long run including the poor.
"Pro worker" leftist policies have major tradeoffs attached to them, it's not a free lunch.
China has 1.5 billion people. Despite the constant economic sabotage done by communism, the large labor supply simply brute forces through many of their issues. And that's pretty much entirely because Deng Xiaoping was like "come on guys, we can't be this stupid we need to be a little pro growth and pro business" and handicapped the communism part.
Europe is awash with "pro worker" policies that cuck their potential to grow. It's basically impossible to fire bad workers, vacation time is way longer than the US, and they tend to have better benefits. And yet as you say, they don't have growth and they're falling behind. Immigration is not the only factor important to growing out an economy and they've taken a knife to their businesses repeatedly in name of supporting the workers. This is what you're arguing for, sacrificing growth and our long term for the short term concentrated benefits.
An actual labor shortage means that every business owner who owns two mansions and three cars has to sell one of their mansions and one of their cars unless they want to lose their entire income and become homeless. No one in America has ever experienced an actual labor short. There are only labor shortages in very narrow subspecialties. If Amazon for some reason needed an experienced Lisp or COBOL engineer, then Amazon needs to spend money to recruit one. Then the sub-occupation of Lisp programmers have a better QoL, and Bezos’ QoL stays exactly the same because he has so much money that it can no longer increase his QoL. We have more than enough wealth wasted (genuinely wasted) at the top, that we can artfully redistribute it to the poor by simply preventing the addition of more low-wage workers.
Nope. It means that the people who want or need something done need to pay more to have it done, otherwise the employee will stop working and find somewhere else to work. You only need a very small amount of “temporarily can’t do it” or “need to do it suboptimally” to accomplish this, only 1 out of 1000 projects, a civilizationally-irrelevant amount. When the QoL and wages of the lower class increase, then they can actually afford to quit their job for months to find a better one, and can actually afford to move to other parts of the country to find a better position. It’s a race to the top in terms of QoL and wellbeing. It’s only bad for the rich who hate the poor. Consider landscaping. A rich person always wants pristine landscaping. In the wealthy areas of the east coast I am familiar with, they universally spend exorbitantly on landscaping and nearly all the employees are illegals who don’t speak English. (The oversees of more sophisticated projects speak English). They are worked to exhaustion and have to eat outside under the shade of trees. What happens when we restrict the labor pool here? If the landscaper doesn’t want to be worked to exhaustion or piss in a bottle, he can quit to find a firm with better QoL; the firms have to compete over QoL in order to retain workers; everything improves for everyone, except the ~0.1% of wealthy properties which did not want to pay more to secure the QoL of the poor. That person may have to hire a local kid to do spotty landscaping, which is also good for the poor. Or maybe the grass grows a little taller (the horror!).
I think what you’re getting at is, “I want to trade the suffering of the poor for greater tech development”. If we compel them to keep working really hard, while their life may be miserable, it’s worth it for the rest because they get more goodies, like 4k VR porn and even more addictive algorithms. But this doesn’t even apply in America, because if you wanted more tech development you would want to restrict the supply of tech employees, whereas we are saturating the field with Indians and Asians. Now all the creative techies do not have the stress-free working conditions or the income affordance necesssary to really dive into passion projects. I mean some do, but only the most conscientious and industrious, ie not the most creative. So you actually have the worst of both worlds here. Not only do we trade the stress and tears of the poor for more waste at the top, but we even trade the stress and tears of our technologically-interested creatives for more waste at the top. If you wanted more tech development, you would want to restrict tech jobs, particularly in regions known for less creativity and less start-up potential. We have done the opposite. We have guaranteed less innovation, and instead we have Mark Zuckerberg 80 billion dollars on the MetaVerse, and Bezos space vanity projects. I will admit that Musk buying x was a good thing though.
What are some of these examples of huge amounts of wealth being genuinely wasted? That'd have to happen in the form of huge amounts of consumption. Most of the wealth at the top is sitting in the form of stocks, at most you get some yachts, which just aren't much of a blip on any measure of consumption.
Too many houses, houses that are too large, too many private pools and other unnecessary amenities, expensive overseas luxury good purchases, too many cars, too many vacations, too many private jets (15k), etc etc etc
Just extraordinary waste which we know, scientifically, does not measurably influence happiness. It is entirely reasonable to design an immigration policy which forces the rich to depart from the resources they waste, so that the resources are necessarily transferred into the lower and middle classes.
Whats your cut off for rich here? Unless you're including like the broad middle class then these forms of consumption are just such a tiny percent of total wealth/consumption that it's hard to take seriously as anything but resentment that they have nice things.
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Weren't you just arguing that labor shortages were good and made people better off? Now you're saying that it means business owners have to sell homes and cars and are at risk of homelessness.
So your argument here that things people value and want done will be less affordable?
I know a poor rural family with a smartphone for every member, clean drinking water available when they want, healthcare from Medicaid, a PS5 with a virtual reality headset (seriously, think of how insane it is that even a rather poor family has personal virtual reality now) , nice tasty food from all around the world with spices many in the past would have never tasted. Their life has luxuries that even the richest and most powerful people a few hundred years ago could only dream of, and that was only possible because of tech development. Even the Rothschild's can not compare to what a fast food worker today can access.
Like hunger in the US is basically non-existent! People don't starve to death except by choice, whereas just a few centuries ago famines were common across the world. In fact today's poor are so well off that having too many calories is significantly more common than getting too little calories. The idea that the poor are suffering from economic growth is complete and obvious hogwash. How bad is it for the poor that they and their kids survive, instead of up to 30% of them dying before their first birthdays?
We saved ~471,955 infants in just one year, many of them to poor families.
Really the only thing that is worse than the past is housing, and not by quality or size (like even the poor have indoor plumbing! The richest a few hundred years ago were still shitting in outhouses or dumping it out on the streets) mind you but by price. And that is a deliberate choice by cities and states around the country to artificially restrict the new supply of homes because even the limited resources of land is used more efficiently than ever.
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There is no denying that growth raises the ceiling. The left-wing view is that raising the ceiling is morally worthless if you do not raise the floor first.
And since the floor never changes, this means the left-wing view results in everyone in poverty forever.
“The real minimum wage is always zero.”
At age 18 when I read that it became instantly obvious to me how few people understand this. This hasn’t changed much in the interim.
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I don't think we're using "the floor" in the same sense - I mean "the floor" in the sense of how badly off the least fortunate members of society can get, and that can clearly be altered. The life of the man who has nothing could be improved considerably if we ended homelessness or gave everyone a UBI; it could be considerably worsened if we outlawed all charity or legalized selling oneself into slavery. You may think that raising the floor from its current position would have negative externalities, you may even think we should lower the floor from said current position, but it's trivially false that it "never changes".
It can be altered in that it can be made worse that the natural floor by instituting torture camps or something similar. But as many cities have demonstrated, some people are bottomless pits of need, and cannot be raised above that natural floor.
Perhaps some, but not all of them. Even if you believe that no significant percentage of modern America's homeless could be meaningfully helped, it's surely undeniable that other places and eras have had much more prevalent homelessness than just that fringe of irrecoverables. The situation of the average unemployable pauper in 2026 America is vastly superior to that of the average unemployable pauper in Dickensian London, and I'm willing to call that raising the floor.
But I think even that is a stretch. Certainly a lot of modern homeless people are wretches who are not realistically going to live decently on their own again. But how did they get this way? Widespread access to hard drugs seems to be a massive slice of the pie. Succeed in massively curtailing access to such drugs (via whichever policy you think is most likely to succeed) and you've already "raised the floor" in a very significant way - however unemployable and disadvantaged you are, you'll be massively less likely to end up as a shambling brain-rotted junkie. It's not a natural inevitability that if you're homeless you'll become a debilitated addict. That's by no means the only way I can think of to help those extreme cases, but I wanted something stark and obvious and not redistributive in nature, or requiring any level of cooperation from the homeless themselves.
If we can't raise the floor for some people, that still means that we can't raise the floor, because that's what it means to be a floor--it's the lowest person.
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Unfortunately, while absolutely true, this is a tough message for politicians to sell. (There's a reason we haven't had another Reagan or Thatcher.) People take it for granted that they have all this stuff that barely even existed 50 years ago, as if this is just the way the arrow of time works. It's a lot easier to promise gibs to people who see that their neighbour has something they don't.
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Americans generally do have the option of sending their families to live in Mexico and sending them remittances.
This would at least require a visa for longer stays, and it looks like permanent residency isn't impossible, but probably isn't affordable to "Americans generally".
My point is that if Mexicans receiving remittances were living high on the hog due to wage and cost of living differentials, as OP suggests, then meeting solvency requirements for immigration should be a piece of cake. The fact that this might not be possible is evidence that they're not.
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Do you seriously think the quality of life for a lower class American is the same in Mexico as it would be for a lower class Mexican who grew up there, speaks the language, has a large extended family there, and associates it with all the nostalgic qualities which make one’s homeland appealing?
Those are social advantages, but yes, an American in Mexico would have more or less the same buying power and quality of life as a local. That's why many less affluent Americans' retirement plan is to move to a poor country.
Buying power mostly yes, quality of life obviously not.
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There are many Americans (including those of non-Mexican descent) who retire in Mexican resort towns, sure. That’s a very different visa class and lifestyle to working a regular job in Mexico.
The same is true even with less economic inequality in Europe. Spain is full of English and German retirees, but barring a few senior corporate executives at Inditex or Santander the only non-Spanish speaking English and Germans who work there are a small number of low pay service workers whose jobs are catering to their own nationality’s tourists and retirees.
We're not talking about people working in Mexico. We're talking about people not working in Mexico and being sent remittances from people working in the US.
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No, but people move around all the time to improve their economic status, including to places where they don't speak the language, have extended families,nor have nostalgia for from growing up there. If these kinds of migrants were getting as good a deal as the OP thinks they are, more people would go in the opposite direction.
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