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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> Third-class passage was £8, approximately $1000 in today's currency, i.e. more expensive than an equivalent trans-atlantic flight today, and too expensive for poor people to typically consider.

Desperately poor people spend well over that to get smuggled across the Mexican border today.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/30/world/smuggli...

> A decade ago, Mexicans and Central Americans paid between $1,000 and $3,000 for clandestine passage into the United States. Now they hand over up to $9,200 for the same journey, the Department of Homeland Security reported last year. Those figures have continued to rise, according to interviews at migrant shelters in Mexico.

> Some would-be migrants give up homes, cars, livestock and even farmland tilled by their families for generations and take on debt to pay the fees.

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You can call people who are willing to spend and have access to $10,000 desperate, but I don't know how useful it is to call them poor.

Your last sentence quoted clearly describes people with inherited wealth. In my opinion, that's not describing a poor person, by almost any measure. It falls into the sibling commenter's category description of petit bourgeoisie.

Those people are really poor, they bet their lives on those $10000 that they don't even own. They are not "willing to spend", they are willing to lose their life for it, it's a huge difference.

They borrow it from the extended family, everyone chips in, it's like a risky investment that some day can pay off.

When the extended family funds are not enough, they borrow from the "organized crime", i.e. the narcos.

Sometimes they don't pay the whole sum before and now they own to the coyotes, which are also the narcos.

During the immigration process, they are getting abducted, executed (whole buses of immigrants were killed in Mexico), the rules change midway, usually they own more money at the end that were agreed at the start.

Definitively they are not the petit bourgeoisie.

Subsistence farmers tend to have both land and homes, yet are desperately poor, eking out just enough of a living to survive.

Some go into debt, hoping there'll be opportunity on the other side of the border. Some lose their lives when they aren't able to pay those debts back to the coyotes.

I'm not going to claim that living a subsistent lifestyle on your own land is a wonderful utopia - I don't think that.

But, relative poverty in this situation would mean that you don't have your own land, to do this.

Wikipedia comments that subsistence farmers typically have meaningful economic power in their community: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_agriculture

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