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And everyone is afraid of immigration. It's bizarre.
We are afraid of immigration because there is so few housing that bringing people will just add to the pressure and make rents even more ridiculously expensive . Also, in my country (Portugal), these workers accept working for less and live in miserable conditions (overcrowded homes, tents outside of Lisbon, etc), making it worse for everyone else, causing an exodus of qualified people and a flood of “tourism workers” because salaries just not increase when there are people accepting to work for less.
Meanwhile our public services are collapsing left and right because qualified people just leave and there are so many new people trying to access public healthcare etc.
This is not the black and white immigration is good/bad you are making it out to be .
I'm from Portugal also and it's not immigration that is driving high rent prices. That's a disingenuous position. Golden visas and Airbnb have contributed MUCH more to this as well as the liberalization of rents coupled with low new housing projects.
The workers that accept low salaries are mostly seasonal workers and they don't compete with locals for decent housing and if you were honest you would mention that most of the time you have plenty of them living in the same space. Again, not occupying a lot of the housing destined for locals. I don't see locals eager to go live in Odemira in the houses occupied by seasonal workers or in Martim Moniz in degraded housing.
Same here and totally agree with you.
I've actually worked in Finance and spent 20 years abroad before coming back to Portugal and it was obvious already when I arrived 4 years ago, that government measures were rigging the housing market to be ever higher: Golden Visa in exchange for €500k "realestate investment", tax discounts for retirees from the rest of Europe to come live in Portugal, Digital Nomad visas, such a bullshit regulatory regime for AirBnB businesses that (eventually, after 10 years) the highest court finally ruled that unlike what the "regulation" said, you can't just convert appartments to AirBnB businesses as you feel like and have to follow the same rules as ALL OTHER BUSINESSES, and, last but not least, a complete total refusal to regulate speculative investment in Portuguese realestate by foreign investors (something as simple as a minimum 6-month residence in Portugal requirement similar to many other countries would've made a huge difference and still be compatible wth EU rules as it doesn't discriminate between portuguese and other EU citizens).
And this was just their Demand side manipulation.
On the Supply side, housing construction was down to 1/3 of what it was in the 80s and there is pretty much no public housing construction in the country of Europe with the lowest percentage of public housing.
Meanwhile we get loud "we've created 100 student accomodation rooms in this old government building we didn't use" announcements as if they're so amazing when the local unis take in 50 thousand students per year for what are typically 3 year courses so 100 new rooms once every 10 years or so is doesn't even touch the problem of student accomodation (itself a subset of the wider housing problem).
(Note that most top level politicians from the 2 parties that alternate in Government have declared income as "real-estate investor").
Portugal is were it is in housing because the Portuguese are mainly dumb and greedy votting for greedy, incompetent snake-oil salesmen.
That said, the "immigration problem" in Portugal has to do with how the country mainly takes in people with far less average levels of Education than the locals, and hence not capable of working in the kind of higher value added jobs as the locals (especially the young). This is why almost everybody working as Uber and food delivery drivers are from Brasil or the Indian Subcontinent - unlike most other countries in Europe, Portugal has very little in the way of selectivity in who can come (especially from Brasil, whose citizens are the largest immigrant community in Portugal) plus it can't really attract the more well educated as richer countries can, so you mainly get a whole different kind of brasilians in Portugal than you get in, for example, Britain were I also lived.
You can't really get your Economy to climb up the value added ladder (and hence pay higher salaries) if you're pushing the locals to have fewer children or, even worse, to leave the country as soon as they finish their degrees, by pumping up house prices to increase your personal rewards from the side-business that you have as "realestate investor" alongside your politician day-job, whilst "making up for it" by importing people with a way lower level of education than those children would end up having and those degree-holding young adults leaving because houses are too expensive already have.
Also from Portugal and did you really just say that the problem with immigration is that they get exploited and then everyone ELSE suffers?
I mean i think you see what’s wrong with that.
Also without immigrants Portugal would be completely fucked because all the young people are leaving the country for better jobs in Europe. Someone needs to pick up the slack otherwise it’s just old people and a couple of children.
Also Portugal has a ton of houses. We are above average in houses per capita iirc. We have a problem with salaries and an over dependence on tourism.
He's just someone trying to provide a false narrative to justify his racism.
Portugal has massive house price inflation problems in the places were the jobs are: all it takes is to look at the house price to incomes ratio in Portugal now and compare it with the historical average (last I checked it was 5x its historical average).
Sure, there are actually empty villages in the deep inland countryside were the only work is "subsistence farming" or "forrestry", for the simple reason that even being a cashier at a supermarket pays better so nobody is going to move there to do that work.
Looking at housing as "all houses everywhere have the same utility value" to be able to come up with that "there is no housing problem in Portugal" bollocks is beyond ridiculous.
That said, blaming immigrants is pure, unadulterated far-right nutter fantasism: the idea that the people with the least power in the country (who can't even vote) are to blame for this is logic-defying, to say the least.
Imagine claiming your issue isn't with immigrants then immediately listing all the reasons immigrants are to blame for the actions of the capitalists that exploit them, and you, and the government that allows it.. 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
no, it's just you who is wilfully ignorant. And afraid. Because of your wilful ignorance.
Imagine not addressing any of the points, and instead just accusing someone of being wilfully ignorant.
How ignorant
Just to be clear, you’re arguing that if capitalism didn’t exist in Europe, we would be building twice as many buildings per year? This is the dumbest take I’ve read today, and I accidentally landed on r/Politics this morning.
Dunno about twice as much but the problem isn’t housing (Portugal has a shit ton of houses). The problem is affordable housing and yes capitalism is very much to blame here.
Not in a “free market = bad” that I’m very much for in many situations but simply because it’s not profitable to build affordable housing. A vast percentage of the housing built in Portugal is for upper middle class, so everyone below that (which in Portugal is a shit ton of people) you are fucked. And even if you lived in a decent house prices have skyrocketed so much that you get kicked out if they can do that.
Capitalism by design is very much against public housing and you don’t even need to imagine how the situation would be if you had that. You can just look at Vienna and see how they are doing in that regard (spoiler: pretty fucking well compared to the rest of Europe/world).