How do you drive out that much of the population without starting a civil war?
Open borders and equal treatment of foreigners are not new concepts in South America. On the contrary, they are part of a constitutional tradition that began when most of the countries in the region gained independence during the early 19th century. In 1811, the first Venezuelan Constitution introduced a clause later replicated by all countries in the region: "All foreigners of any nation will be admitted into the State." Equal treatment, mainly with regard to civil rights, and a rapid path toward naturalization were also incorporated, chiefly to lure European migrants. Such settlement was intended as a means of building civilization by those considered to be civilized, i.e. Europeans-- summarized by the famous slogan from Argentine political theorist Juan Bautista Alberdi: "To govern is to populate." Immigration by others deemed less virtuous, such as Ottomans, Indians, Chinese, or Africans, was to be avoided. Even with that caveat in mind, the free movement enshrined in early South American constitutions represented a radical break with the prior colonial system, where mobility was completely restricted.
It would be nice if they acknowledged Anglo-America shared that general strategy in that period.
Anglo-Americas are always seeking acknowledgement. Their kind of pushy that way, if you ask me.
2: Why? The piece isn't about Anglo-America, nor the period you mention, nor comparison of Latin and Anglo America. The author appears to be Latin-American himself, if that matters.
Appears not to be Anglo-American, rather.
It's not strictly necessary to the point, so I am probably being churlish, but it is published in a broader global context (think tank with offices in the US and Brussels), plus being, you know, in English, so I read it as implying pro-immigration policy was not an Anglo-American thing, even historically. (I guess the paragraph I quoted only mentioned the whole of or parts of South America, and that is indeed the focus of the article, but in a subsequent paragraph it briefly broadened to use the word "Hispano-American", which to me implied a contrast.)
I didn't see that implication. But comity I guess.
There's probably some negative correlation of openness to immigration with labor laws. The more you can abuse migrants, the more welcome they might be. But I don't know enough about South American labor laws to know if that applies.
I did, for a change. But that was this morning and I forgot what it said.
Anyway this
In a further contrast to the European free movement regime, where EU migrants must demonstrate employment or sufficient resources after three months, there is no such requirement in South America. Considering the large degree of informality in the South American labor market, affecting up to 47 percent of all nonagricultural workers according to the International Labor Organization, such a condition would render the agreement meaningless for large segments of the population. If a migrant chooses to become a permanent resident after two years, he or she must then prove enough resources to sustain him- or herself in the host state.looks consistent with 9.
That made me forget stuff. But, on re-reading, it sounds like they are trying treat migrants well, but what I've been reading in the news (and the 2nd link) suggests that maybe some of these laws won't survive long if pressed.
14: The British are afraid of Polish plumbers, but the Germans are afraid of lazy Italians.
Honored by the reading, not the brunch. Unless you poured me a libation.
No. I drank everything myself. But I'm generally inclined to think that the next decades are going to bring more migration (global warming, shittier governments, more ethnic violence) and less accommodation for refugees. I would like to be wrong and overly pessimistic from what I see domestically.
Also this:
migrants accounted for just 5.1 million of the 406 million residents in South America in 2015--well less than half the global 3.3 percent share--immigrants from elsewhere in the region accounted for 63 percent of the foreign-born totalRelatively few migrants, and culturally not so alien. Except Brazil, maybe:
Paraguay and Argentina have the largest shares of regional migrants in their non-national populations, with 90 percent and 80 percent respectively, and Brazil has the lowest with 30 percent.
Did you burn some bacon for me at least?
It was a really fancy restaurant brunch. I had steak and polenta with frenchy sauce.
Polenta has never impressed me.
I remember taking my father out to eat at a fancy restaurant one time early in the ascendence of polenta (which I like), and ordering it only to have him exclaim with some asperity, "this is just cornmeal mush!" (which I like). cornmeal mush is a traditional dish in south carolina for broke-ass people. I am unsure as to whether polenta is a traditional dish in italy for broke-ass people, but I suspect so, meaning maybe you shouldn't pay $18 for it or whatever. having said which, you should eat it at home because it is delicious. easy dinner is polenta with butter and parmesan, topped with cooked greens and a lacy egg fried in blazing olive oil. try it, o ye skeptics.
re: 14 and 16
The UK chose not to implement that part of the EU freedom of movement rules. So, you don't have to prove that you are in employment or have sufficient resources after three months. iI's completely free entry, no restrictions, no supervision, for anyone with an EU passport.
In retrospect, that may not have been the most politically expedient decision. It's something that the right-wing assholes in the Tory party and UKIP have used to drive xenophobia and ultimately, Brexit. But, you know, fuck them.
I am unsure as to whether polenta is a traditional dish in italy for broke-ass people, but I suspect so
Yes it is - the average north Italian labourer actually got significantly poorer from 1500 to 1800, as witness the fact that he could afford bread as a staple in 1500 but only polenta in 1800.
No steak and bearnaise sauce with it?
1 is an interesting question.
@25 I assume there was also a shift in the type of grain that was cultivated, is corn easier to grow than wheat?
ISTR reading an ethnographic study of Italy in the early 20th century, seasonal labourers were feed bread - but it canny landlords would cut the flour with soil to make it go further.
28.1: it is far more productive; you get 17 million calories in usable food from an acre of corn, only 4 million calories from an acre of wheat.
Wheat is actually easier to grow because it can tolerate drought and cold weather better, but corn and potatoes are how you maximise calories per cultivated acre.
Did it work that well before center-pivot irrigation and modern fertilizer?
The absence of corn in Italy in 1500 is not evidence of wealth, but of the Atlantic Ocean separating Italy from the world corn supply in 1500 (also true of the "traditional" base for Italian cooking, the tomato).
32: this is taken from Robert Allen, "Global Economic History". He was using it as an illustration of income, measured as multiples of the cost of a minimal-cost subsistence diet. In 1500 northern Italian labourers were earning enough over and above that minimum that they could afford to have a diet based on bread as well as other luxuries. In 1800 they weren't; they needed to get their calories in the cheapest form possible, which was polenta.
"Living standards then [15th century] were also high: labourers earned about four times bare-bones subsistence. By the 18th century, however, a great divergence had occurred in Europe [measured in the living standards of the working population]. The standard of living on the continent collapsed, and labourers earned only enough to buy the items listed in Table 2 or equivalent [a bare-bones diet of the minimum amount of calories and protein in the cheapest possible form, plus a bit of cloth and fuel]. In the Middle Ages Florentine workers ate bread, but by the 18th century they could afford only polenta made from maize, newly introduced from the Americas."
31. Seemed to work OK for the Sumerians and Akkadians. The Egyptians originally built their civilisation on barley, but they were producing enough wheat by the 1st century that Vespasian could basically pull off a coup d'etat by blockading the grain ships from Egypt to Rome.
I meant the 17 million calories per acre with 🌽.
🌽 was rapidly adopted all over the old world, suggesting it was better than the pre-existing grains.
Wheat is also grown very widely across the new world, suggesting that...
Is that 17M figure true of older strains of corn available in the 18th century?
Human sacrifice wasn't, suggesting I'm not sure what.
Corn spread into the interior in Africa and SE Asia (India?) well in advance of European settlement. Did that happen with wheat in the Americas?
Both of which, to be fair, move faster than wheat.
In some areas invasive jockeys are still a problem.
suggesting it was better than the pre-existing grains.
Apart from the pellagra.
But when I transcribed the global warming protest sign that used 🚗 and 🌎, someone used the word "illiterate".
The article kind of sucked too. It couldn't be that hard to explain what the 'RV' would mean about either the Iraqi economy or ours.
14, 16, 24: "The UK chose not to implement that part of the EU freedom of movement rules. So, you don't have to prove that you are in employment or have sufficient resources after three months. iI's completely free entry, no restrictions, no supervision, for anyone with an EU passport."
Are you sure this is correct, ttaM? My understanding was that:
1- What the UK did differently than most EU countries was to waive the transition period for freedom of movement for the new (2004) EU countries. If you were a citizen of e.g. Croatia, you didn't get freedom of movement in most of the EU until recently -- but you did in the UK. See chart here.
2- The UK also didn't exclude immigrants from social benefits as much as they could have, although I'm not clear on how much this was foreclosed by EU law due to UK social benefits being non-contributory rather than contributory, and hence hard to get around.
3- Do you have any links about the UK waiving the need to be employed after 90 days? I couldn't come up with anything about that in some quick searching.
51: What do you mean, by "what the 'RV' would mean"? From what I can tell it's a fever dream with no grounding in anything economic, and they got that across at least.
The UK didn't implement any of this, and most of all, as we don't have an identity card system, nobody needed know or care.
53: I don't think they did. They're trying it like a penny sick and saying that there's no chance of 100000% appreciation. Which is true. But it's not a stock. It's a currency and that kind of shift in prices would mean the U.S. economy collapsed.
52: The key thing is that the UK didn't enforce the requirement for comprehensive sickness insurance, or more broadly for self-sufficiency if not employed. This allowed the likes of UKIP to portray EU migrants as leeching off the NHS.
that kind of shift in prices would mean the U.S. economy collapsed
Not even a major, worse-than-the-Depression crash - nothing short of classic hyperinflation, since they're imagining an exchange rate dropping by 99.975%. I'm okay with the characterization "semi-mythical".
Thanks.
Lord, those tweets. They read like they're petitioning the king.
|| Heart-warming story of the day! Remember Bat-Kid? He lives! And is now cancer-free!
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/miles-scott-batkid-cancer-free-san-francisco-make-a-wish-foundation/ ||
Where are those of you getting news of Venezuela getting your news of Venezuela? There was a thread here probably last year, right?
I'm not. OP link 3 is to a site a read regularly, but that isn't its focus. CFR has a pile of stuff and I think I'll set an alert for them.
I'm just going to rely on people here to keep me informed.
I followed the recommendation in the 2017 post to Caracas Chronicles, and [CONTENT NOTE: CRYPTOCURRENCY AND CRYPTO-SKEPTICISM] I learned that a tiny bit of good is being done by cryptocurrency. Also harm. Link.
When it comes to crypto, Venezuela represents two sides of the same coin. On one hand, Venezuela is a crypto-dystopia where a dictatorship uses the technology to finance itself (we have covered the petro and its insidious purpose a few times now). But on the other hand, Venezuela is one of the most compelling cases for widespread crypto-adoption. The country's rampant inflation and the government's irresponsible economic policies created a need for alternative currency. Years of relatively free electricity gave rise to a robust crypto-community and, today, Venezuela is among the countries with the highest trading volumes on LocalBitcoins.com.
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Speaking of recent threads on bad situations, a Uighur-American friend of mine feels like the world isn't doing enough to stop what's going on there, and wishes more people could pay attention.
Her headline here is heartbreaking: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2018/10/19/my-aunt-and-sister-in-china-have-vanished-are-they-being-punished-for-my-activism/ Here's another: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/18/world/asia/uighur-muslims-china-detainment.html
In a different century, I represented a number of people in asylum cases in the Immigration Court. Every one of them had had family members killed because of their activism. Which pretty much worked: they fled, to avoid further harm to their families. Still, goddam heroes every one of them.
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||
And closer to home, in the census case, Judge Furman entered this order denying the government's most recent motion to stay. Read it, folks.
|?
Buttcoiners have been making ridiculous claims overhyping crytpocurrency use in Venezuela for years. Venezuela holds an odd place in their hearts - as the place the United States will become once our economy collapses when an inevitable frenzy of runaway inflation befalls our filthy fiat currency (soon!) - and at the same time an example of how such a society can be saved by Bitcoin. Accordingly, 99% of what they say about Bitcoin and Venezuela is bullshit.
Sure, probably some of the feel-good stories about wealthy Venezuelans using Bitcoin to expatriate their hard currency are true - and yeah I guess the four tiny projects cited in 64 are nice - but most of what limited Bitcoin activity has occurred in Venezuela boils down to the fact that mining Bitcoin is probably the most lucrative thing one can do with stolen electricity.
I am familiar with other manifestations of this the-future-is-in-X-locale phenomenon and find your description highly believable. I didn't know about the petro.
On the Uighurs, is there any symbol (flag etc.) that would express solidarity and support that I could put somewhere conspicuous, such as my bag or laptop or car, just to get it in people's faces as I go about life in the Bay Area? It's a small and insufficient thing, but sometimes visibility is important...
64 reminds me why I didn't follow that blog.
I think Spike has given that piece all the consideration it deserves, but to be a bit more charitable:
I stand to be corrected, but AFAIK Venezuela basically went like this:
1. State policies destroyed local production of all sorts; that plus a fall in oil prices destroyed Venezuelan exports.
2. Consequently, Venezuela needs massive imports but has no exports to pay for them.
3. The state started printing money to cover the fiscal deficit resulting from (1), hence the hyperinflation.
Introducing crypto to this situation does nothing. The economy was destroyed by government policy in general, not by monetary policy; crypto won't reverse those policies or recreate the production that used to pay for imports. Venezuelans can't pay for the imports they need in crypto without buying crypto first; they can't buy crypto with bolívars because bolívars aren't worth anything. So they would have to buy crypto with hard assets, which would be insane because there's no guarantee the crypto will retain value.
Inflation is worst for people on fixed incomes and for creditors. People paying the fixed incomes can't pay in hard crypto if their incomes are in depreciating bolívars*; for the same reason debtors can't accept hard crypto loans (and again the creditors need somehow to buy crypto in the first place). So crypto can only be useful if a substantial fraction of the economy adopts it all at once, such that those involved can reasonably expect both incomes and expenses to be in crypto.
So it's a collective action problem. Which is really hard to solve. Which is why everywhere except Somalia has ended up with a state-managed currency.
*And if they are exporters with hard-currency incomes they have no reason to do so.
68: These people apparently are supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. The symbols aren't easily distinguished from those used by actual terrorists though, so tricky.
The advantages of having a hard alternative to your hyperinflating local currency are obvious. That's why Venezuelans use dollars. The advantages of having an alternative that oscillates wildly in value, is extremely user-unfriendly, and requires internet connectivity to use are less obvious. That's why Venezuelans generally don't use crypto currency.
They seem happy though to use this.
66: Ok, I read it. Why does the government want so badly to put a citizenship question in the census?
BTW, Bitcoin has dropped 30% in price over the past week if any of y'all are into schadenfreude.
73: to discourage brown people from responding to it, thus leading to an underestimate of the population of brown-people areas of the country, and hence to their underrepresentation in Congress.
73 Because they want people in the US illegally to refuse to be counted, which will result in a significant undercount in places like California and NYC. Since we allocate congressional seats based on the census, the hope is that California can be cheated out of a seat, and maybe it will go to some place a little paler.
68 I like the idea, and will do the same. I've sent Rushan an IM, and will let you know what she says.
Also it can be handy to have list of foreigners that can be used in support of immigration-related round-ups. There is also a pretext for deporting you if you lied on the form.
Oh, hey, maybe we'll get it: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-05/states-in-west-south-projected-to-gain-house-seats-after-2020
Which is pretty exciting: we lost one after the 1990 census. Giving it back will almost certainly add a Democrat to the House.
Oh JUST WAIT, the crypto economy is going to evolve ANY MINUTE and sex dolls will 3D-print themselves and expand to the size of a small apartment on command. No, it isn't your dream house, but ten years ago it was INCONCEIVABLE.
(srsly, the article seemed kind of self-undermining, but I didn't realize "crypto in Venezuela" was that much of a cliché. Anyway, perfect for Thanksgiving week: my god, I could be living in those Caracas Chronicles comments. My former grad school had a Latin American Studies center that had basically one any-discipline pot of money to give grad students, and it was for research in Venezuela. I wonder if anyone ever uses it now.)
78: we really should expand the House. The number of people each rep is being expected to represent is getting too big. In short, I don't want to lose any of our delegation, but I recognize that everyone deserves to be represented proportionately.
re: 52
Yeah, as others have said, I am right about this.
