"It's because you have to be dreaming to believe it."
I immigrated to the US as a highly educated engineer from a poor Asian country. My country was poor, but not terrible, not a dictatorship, etc. If I had never immigrated, I would still have done fine, although in absolute terms maybe I wouldn't be as rich as I am today.
My journey was completely different from a farm laborer from Latin America. People like me came through university student visas, converted to worker visas, and paid fees to immigrate legally. We feel that we achieved everything through our own hard work, talent, and grit. We are blind to our own luck and privilege.
We will often look down upon illegal laborers and want the process to be "strict" for them, too. We don't even really understand things through their point of view. Our attitude is the same in our old country--- we are already the elite there, and we have little sympathy for poor people's problems. We call them lazy. If only they would pull themselves up by their bootstraps like we did, they could also have the American dream.
That's us, one type of immigrant. We're not really different from native-born, well-off Americans. The only difference is, we also look down upon those American engineers who whine about being displaced by H-1B immigrants. We have no sympathy for them, either. They need to deal with it, just as poor laborers do. It's just logic.
The lack of social safety net, decline of publicly accessible assistance in healthcare and education, and the unpredictability of immigration enforcement has led to an increase in emigrants from the United States back to Latin America and Asia.
To give a personal anecdote: I was helping a woman apply for advanced parole, which is an immigration action that allows for someone who entered the United States illegally to re-enter in the future, provided certain qualifications were met. In the irony of ironies, she had spent the last several years saving enough money to go back home (and to pay her respects to one of her parents who had just passed), and wanted to preserve the option of coming back the the United States, if possible.
After reviewing the details of her immigration history, I advised her that she was unlikely to be granted this parole, and that if she left she would be unlikely to be allowed to re-enter.
My translation of her Spanish is poor, but the essence was, “If I’m going to struggle, I want to do it where I have friends and family whom I can help, and who can help me. There is no help here.”
She left without parole, effectively banning herself from the United States, and based on the message she sent me the following Easter, it seems to be without regret.
To borrow your words, I think “[o]nly an extremely naive and privileged person would even pretend” that poverty in the United States has a superior character to poverty elsewhere.
You seem to have quoted someone somewhere concerning “poverty is worse.” I’m not finding it in my text. Did you mean to reply elsewhere?
Life under 21st-century American capitalism is bad, but it's even worse outside of the imperial core. Two things can both be true.
Human laws reinforce power and social dynamics, stable equilibrium solutions the result of thousands of years of human conflict.
There are no "rules" beyond physics, and the rule breakers often wind up ahead.
The rule makers don't want to pay for those that cannot contribute more than they consume. To put it another way, they don't want their taxes to go up. One lever to control this is through immigration policy.
The voting class is told unskilled immigrant labor is a net negative. Skilled labor, a positive. One side tells them skilled labor threatens their jobs and total compensation, another side tells them it's alright and that we're at a shortage for labor. There are abstract reasons you can point to for each of these ideologies, but ultimately each side is fundamentally concerned with money.
Every one of us is ultimately about consuming energy. For those of us fortunate enough, we can care about Starbucks, how many homes we own, and what kind of luxury goods we have. But at the end of the day, if it were all taken away and we had to fight for food and energy, nearly every one of us would.
Step out into the Serengeti alone and you'll be eaten. There are no rules.
I am of the mindset that the decent functioning of human society is an entitlement and that people who deliberately cause dysfunction (such as Davos assholes, who are deliberately destroying the U.S. middle class to set some weird kind of example) should be treated as reneging criminals and removed from power using whatever means are necessary. Some people coat doorknobs in feces (or, say, found companies with terrible cultures, support capitalism past its deserving end-of-life) simply because they enjoy the thrill of being the cause; others among us, people of culture, are entitled to a society that protects us from the fecal spreaders. That's literally why we permit the state to exist; so it will protect us. However, it does a terrible job these days.
But yes, it is true that, absent the existence of human society, I am owed nothing (since the lions and gazelles and wolves clearly owe me nothing).
Then you talk to people who came to the country with literally nothing (refugees) and now they have a comfortable middle class existence, own a home, their kids are American citizens going to prestigious colleges.
It's really eye opening.
Do you think the fact you're a "US white guy" has any impact on your ability to land such a role? Or the fact you're qualified for it (i.e. access to quality education in the US)?