13 ms·

Expats are moving to Portugal

82 points by Anon84 5y ago

rootos 5y ago
One thing to keep in mind is that Portugal allows dual citizenship while Spain does not. Greek is much harder to learn than Portuguese. Many folks would spend 5 years, get the EU passport, and then have the option to move in the EU.
quantified 5y ago
People with means or with luck of their home economy are learning how destabilizing wealth disparities can be when you move your wealth around outside of the plutonomy. They’re not feeling destabilized, but their new environs is.
- rektide 5y ago
  > They’re not feeling destabilized, but their new environs is. That they are feeling (vastly) better off than they would have IS a destabilization, just not in the negative sense.
  - quantified 5y ago
    That seems valid.
vmception 5y ago
In the words of Smoky the Bear, “Remember, only you, can gentrify the neighborhood.” Interesting that the Golden Visa is not doing applications in the big cities anymore. Remember that there is an employment route that doesn't involve purchasing property in Portugal. I think its having 8 portuguese employees
vmception 5y ago
California has 40 million people Any place where just a tiny fraction, less than 1%, want to check out will get a wild market distortion. Whether it was all those small and medium sized towns getting remote workers during the Alpha and hardcore Delta days Or places in Portugal The story will be the same
- rektide 5y ago
  > Any place where just a tiny fraction, less than 1%, want to check out will get a wild market distortion. Completely & totally ignores the scale of market impact an expat/wealthy-immigrant people have. There's plenty of people who would rather live somewhere else. Most have limited ability to move somewhere & make an impact. This story is about as opposite as that as can be told: the worlds 0.03% want cheaper places to live & will go commandeer their way into a conceniently available low priced local economy. What your thesis totally avoids is that the the wealthy can afford & have the possibility of seeking lower costs of living, of setting themselves up high elsewhere. They will displace both locals & other people who might seek to immigrate to a specificly advantageous place. There's hardly a scene more tragic to imagine. There may be some modest benefit for this area, but doubtful. This will just create market pressure in one of the few places that had been affordable.
  - vmception 5y ago
    So, which part of what you wrote was the opposite of what I wrote? California has a lot of people that fit the bill that you just described. This is an LATimes article about Californians in Portugal. Everywhere I went over the last 2 years had California remote workers doing the same thing in that location. California has a lot of decently capitalized remote workers who dont require to be subjects of California’s or America’s problems.
    - rektide 5y ago
      > So, which part of what you wrote was the opposite of what I wrote? The part where you said any group of people, and I said a very wealthy group of people.
      - vmception 5y ago
        I think there are at least 400,000 Californians (1%) that are wealthy enough and flexible enough to be in that global 0.03% cohort you mentioned
nazavo 5y ago
Portugal has been extremely popular with the nomad community too. A good dozen of friends of mine have already moved there through NHR and lots more are in the works. There are also projects like rebase.co, which make things super easy to set up base in the country. It seems like it's getting to a point where Portugal so popular, it might steer people away from itself instead.
- jorl17 5y ago
  It's amazing that people within the country (I live in Portugal and am portuguese) mostly want to get out, and so many people seem to want to get in (to work outside). I genuinely don't 100% get it.
  - pydry 5y ago
    I noticed when I last visited that many uber rides were like, 2.50 eur. Kind of makes sense in that context. If youve got money the country is great. If you need to earn it it sucks.
  - maxlamb 5y ago
    I think the reason is that the majority of people moving in to Portugal are nomads who already have high salaries, and the Portuguese trying to get out either have low salaries or are unemployed.
    - jorl17 5y ago
      Most of my friends are very much employed, pretty smart (they'd get a job pretty much anywhere, probably FAANG, too) and they are either out of the country or want to get out. In general, they want higher salaries (like you mentioned), but there also seems to be a clear disdain for most of the portuguese cultural heritage, to be honest. This might be an ecochamber (I'd put money on it being the case) but most people "around me" who are in "the tech world" are pretty much diametrically opposed to most portuguese customs and culture. They don't really identify with the country, the history, the religion, the folklore, the politics, the sports...and if you add the income disparity to it, it makes sense that they want to leave. If not for the will of my Significant Others throughout the years, I would have definitely left a looooong time ago. (Man, I find it somewhat atrocious how much we like to tell the great stories of how we went and stole, raped, killed and enslaved during the time of the discoveries, all for our own pleasure (and that of our religion). I guess I can somewhat frame it in its time, but you will never hear me talk about our "great accomplishments" in that regard. I'm deeply ashamed of them, not proud.)
c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago
Hong Kong expats fleeing HK to Singapore are currently gentrifying the SG real estate market. HK'r's are accustomed to paying far more money for much less space. Add this with the fact the incoming HK'r's are effectively "panic leasing" anything they can get their hands on by offering way over the ask. I have friends who've had their rents increase from +30% to +115% when renewals come up.
- et-al 5y ago
  Please correct me, but I thought Singapore was already relatively expensive compared to the rest of Asia given its tax haven status.
  - c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago
    Yes, Singapore is expensive and getting worse. Low taxes are nice (for everyone except Americans). SG Citizens enjoy certain benefits like the ability to purchase subsidized housing which helps to reduce the cost of living. Foreigners such as myself are stuck with a high(er) cost of living due to housing and lack of access to local schools (read: expensive private international schools. Being a small island with a dense population, nearly everything is imported.
    - nmfisher 5y ago
      As someone currently living in Singapore, I can echo this.
    - devoutsalsa 5y ago
      I met a woman from Singapore who told me that their are ordinary cows in the Singapore zoo. A cow is considered exotic because there aren’t any cattle farms! I thought it was funny.
    - refurb 5y ago
      Us citizens can exclude $110k USD in foreign income and for Singapore $50k of housing expenses, so $160k USD or $220k SGD. Massive tax benefits for Americans too.
foogazi 5y ago
Did you change the title ?
softcactus 5y ago
Expats? You mean immigrants?
- woleium 5y ago
  Migrant workers?
  - EdwardDiego 5y ago
    They're here to pick your SEO strategies.
- kmonsen 5y ago
  No this is white people
  - sfmike 5y ago
    "white" people can't immigrate? Are they immobile ? What's preventing them from immigrating?
    - elevaet 5y ago
      They were being facetious, it's a critique of the racist/classist tendency in our language to label people with brown skin living in another country as "immigrants" but white people as "ex-pats". It's related to the history of WASP colonialism.
      - _v7gu 5y ago
        I think they tread the line in reverse here: I don't think LA Times would put out news that call for immigrants to "go home" but it's fair game when they call them expats.
    - imran-iq 5y ago
      They don't like being called immigrants since they use it in a mostly negative context, so they are expats :)
fernly 5y ago
For those intrigued, Greece has a "Golden Visa" program with a mere €250,000 buy-in. Spain has one at €500,000, same as Portugal. I would think Spain, with its larger cities and a language that is more familiar to most Californians than Portuguese, would have greater appeal. Ireland offers an "investor" residency program with a €1M buy-in. Just as charming and scenic, although worse weather, plus they speak something very like English <jk>. All of these countries, as well as New Zealand and Australia, offer residency to people of working age with professional qualifications in any of a long list of skills.
- edmcnulty101 5y ago
  Do you have to pay 250,000 for the Visa? Or just have that much in your bank account?
  - mdorazio 5y ago
    See here: https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/eu-golden-visas/greece-golden-visa/ https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/eu-golden-visas/greece-gold... It’s effectively a 250k investment requirement (property purchase of similar). So it’s not a net worth thing.
  - tananaev 5y ago
    Usually you need to invest it, but not sure about this specific program. Rental property is a good investment if you want a relatively safe, easy and stable option.
  - Gys 5y ago
    In Portugal it has to be an investment (350K+ depending on where) which ideally is a house. Purchased with the visa in mind, has to be mentioned in the contract. You should involve a lawyer for that. The house (or apartment) can have a mortgage and be rented out. I learned this from selling a house in Cascais to a Taiwanees woman.
- Natsu 5y ago
  The US has a similar sort of visa for foreign investors, I think it's this one: https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/permanent-workers/eb-5-immigrant-investor-program https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/permanent...
United857 5y ago
https://archive.ph/IJKQi https://archive.ph/IJKQi
lifeplusplus 5y ago
Gentrification isn't a bad thing or not any worse than what has been happening. Take Brooklyn in NYC it went from.. British farmers, to Irish, to black, to Jewish, to Russians, to Spanish... Things change world changes everything changes
sometimeshuman 5y ago
I think people from coastal California, such as the couple featured in the article, take for granted the spontaneous joy when random friends and family pop into the city, because of a work trip for example, and try to meet up. And then proceed to have a deep meaningful conversation in your native language where you get each other's references, figures of speech, jokes, and are generally on the same wavelength. It seems shortsighted to move to tiny coastal city in Europe that you can probably see in a weekend visit, where you rarely get to express yourself in your own language, spending years constantly frustrating and annoying people when speaking their language, having no cultural attachment, possibly destroying your career, and the sinking feeling that you may never see most of your friends and family again let alone that exciting spontaneous visit. I thought it was because you could get a place on the beach at a considerably lower price than California but the city mentioned, Cascais, seems similarly priced. The lower crime rate is a compelling reason to move but still seems insufficient.
- dimmke 5y ago
  Portugal seriously sucks. The food is bad, and yeah you can see about all there is to see in both Lisboa and Porto in under a week. I was really turned off when I went there in November. I think it's a magnet for this stuff because it's cheaper than the rest of Europe and the government has openly marketed itself to this kind of thing (to the detriment of the citizens, who are being priced out of housing and a lot of whom are leaving for other countries.)
  - deanCommie 5y ago
    > The food is bad Dear, your credibility: Goodbye.
    - nmfisher 5y ago
      Never been, but after visiting Spain last year, I struggle to believe Portugal has bad food.
      - 5y ago
DeathArrow 5y ago
>She also wanted her son to have free college tuition in EU nations once the family gains citizenship. As I see it, immigrants from the US have something to do win from this deal: better way of leaving, affordable homes, lower prices, safety, free healthcare, free tuition, citizenship in EU. I wonder what's in it for the Europeans. As it seems, the Portuguese people have to deal with higher home prices, higher food prices, but maybe there is an upside for them too?
- nine_zeros 5y ago
  Portuguese economy gets a boost. In an aging society, immigration is the only way to maintain economic activity and pay our pensions/benefits.
- FinnKuhn 5y ago
  Most European countries have an ever ageing population, so immigration can help counter that trend. Additionally there are labour shortages all over and the taxes immigrants pay also help the country.
- scotty79 5y ago
  > I wonder what's in it for the Europeans. Money. That's what Americans are good for. Bringing in money they earned elsewhere. And that money (while it raises prices) ends up in the hands of local companies, landlords and governments.
  - maa5444 5y ago
DeathArrow 5y ago
>Within the mix of retirees, digital nomads and young families fed up with issues including the costs of housing and healthcare, Trumpian politics and pandemic policies, Given that Trump is not the president since a long time and California is the most progressive US state, I'd think that Californians are fleeing progressive politics, not Trumpian politics.
- otterley 5y ago
  Californians are fleeing high prices, not progressive politics. The progressive politics there have attracted people for decades, so much so that it’s become unaffordable.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Yeah, no. Paying $3M for a house in SF but public schools aren’t an option because “math is racist” is fleeing progressive politics.
    - otterley 5y ago
      Show me your data, and I’ll validate your claim. The great weight of stories published on this question indicates that people are vacating to live less expensively/more lavishly, not to be with people less politically progressive. Are there a few such people? Sure. But they’re hardly the majority. There are a lot of reasons why people choose not to send their kids to public school. Sometimes it’s because they perceive the public school as unsafe. The primary reason isn’t because parents disagree with the math curriculum, but because they want to give their kids a leg up in the fiercely competitive race to get into a top university. When everyone around you is wealthy and smart, parents try to find whatever advantage they can.
      - refurb 4y ago
        “Parents want schools that are safe, they want their kids good at math”. Two things progressive schools don’t offer.
EdwardDiego 5y ago
I've always loved how migrants become expats when they're white. I had thought it was exclusively a preserve of the British in anywhere in Europe that's sunny, and people who moved to Singapore or Dubai for the money, but hey, welcome to the club, Californians into yoga!
- hnhg 5y ago
  It’s introducing a class system into migration. One must signal they’re not part of the riffraff.
  - uuee 4y ago
- emteycz 5y ago
  That's not true. I know plenty of non-white expats. At least here it's about money, not skin color.
- wenc 5y ago
  I think expatriate actually has a different shade of meaning from migrant. Expats are typically people living outside their country on a non-permanent basis (on assignment or some temporary basis), with no intention to permanent emigrate to the country. Immigrants however are people who move to a country with the intention of settling there permanently. From the article's description, it sounds like these folks are expats, probably in Portugal on a D7 or Golden Visa (both are temporary visas). Some may elect to apply for citizenship after a period of residency (5 years), in which case they would become immigrants if the choose to remain. I guess some just stay long enough to get an EU passport, and then they buzz off -- then they wouldn't be migrants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriate
  - heavenlyblue 4y ago
    I would say migrants are those who are planning to integrate, if not always culturally then at least economically in the future country. Expats are those who are neither looking for work, learn the language or associate themselves with the locals, add to local culture.
scotty79 5y ago
Does Portugal still have 0% tax on money earned from selling cryptocurrencies?
- mderazon 4y ago
  They are going to change it to 28%
zmibes 5y ago
"Californians are making themselves known in a country once considered the forgotten sibling of Spain." What does that even mean? Anyway. Rich foreigners make capital city too expensive for some locals. Hardly news. Come, learn Portuguese, have fun and spend your money. Portugal is a sovereign(ish) nation. Let them accept immigration as they wish. This theatrical hand-wringing doesn't help anyone.
madduci 4y ago
This story looks like a repetition of the playbook seen in Berlin along all these years. Once defined the Startup Heaven, now the housing market is hotter than ever and rents are skyrocketing too. A lot of people can't deal or afford the rent anymore, building new apartments is going at a slow pace and whenever a new housing project comes out, it's already sold out. Some houses have reached the 1 Million Euro price. Lisbon is set to follow this same path which will make everything worse for people already living there.
- tormeh 4y ago
  The capital and biggest city of Germany was always going to be expensive. IMO the capital shouldn’t have been moved back to Berlin. Anyway, that’s too late now. What I’d like to see is administration and ministries moved far out of the city into Brandenburg.
hackbinary 4y ago
People calling themselves "expats" is a bad look. Expats are immigrants.

82 points by Anon84 5y ago

One thing to keep in mind is that Portugal allows dual citizenship while Spain does not. Greek is much harder to learn than Portuguese. Many folks would spend 5 years, get the EU passport, and then have the option to move in the EU.

quantified 5y ago

People with means or with luck of their home economy are learning how destabilizing wealth disparities can be when you move your wealth around outside of the plutonomy. They’re not feeling destabilized, but their new environs is.

rektide 5y ago
> They’re not feeling destabilized, but their new environs is. That they are feeling (vastly) better off than they would have IS a destabilization, just not in the negative sense.
- quantified 5y ago
  That seems valid.

vmception 5y ago

In the words of Smoky the Bear, “Remember, only you, can gentrify the neighborhood.” Interesting that the Golden Visa is not doing applications in the big cities anymore. Remember that there is an employment route that doesn't involve purchasing property in Portugal. I think its having 8 portuguese employees

vmception 5y ago

California has 40 million people Any place where just a tiny fraction, less than 1%, want to check out will get a wild market distortion. Whether it was all those small and medium sized towns getting remote workers during the Alpha and hardcore Delta days Or places in Portugal The story will be the same

rektide 5y ago
> Any place where just a tiny fraction, less than 1%, want to check out will get a wild market distortion. Completely & totally ignores the scale of market impact an expat/wealthy-immigrant people have. There's plenty of people who would rather live somewhere else. Most have limited ability to move somewhere & make an impact. This story is about as opposite as that as can be told: the worlds 0.03% want cheaper places to live & will go commandeer their way into a conceniently available low priced local economy. What your thesis totally avoids is that the the wealthy can afford & have the possibility of seeking lower costs of living, of setting themselves up high elsewhere. They will displace both locals & other people who might seek to immigrate to a specificly advantageous place. There's hardly a scene more tragic to imagine. There may be some modest benefit for this area, but doubtful. This will just create market pressure in one of the few places that had been affordable.
- vmception 5y ago
  So, which part of what you wrote was the opposite of what I wrote? California has a lot of people that fit the bill that you just described. This is an LATimes article about Californians in Portugal. Everywhere I went over the last 2 years had California remote workers doing the same thing in that location. California has a lot of decently capitalized remote workers who dont require to be subjects of California’s or America’s problems.
  - rektide 5y ago
    > So, which part of what you wrote was the opposite of what I wrote? The part where you said any group of people, and I said a very wealthy group of people.
    - vmception 5y ago
      I think there are at least 400,000 Californians (1%) that are wealthy enough and flexible enough to be in that global 0.03% cohort you mentioned

nazavo 5y ago

Portugal has been extremely popular with the nomad community too. A good dozen of friends of mine have already moved there through NHR and lots more are in the works. There are also projects like rebase.co, which make things super easy to set up base in the country. It seems like it's getting to a point where Portugal so popular, it might steer people away from itself instead.

jorl17 5y ago
It's amazing that people within the country (I live in Portugal and am portuguese) mostly want to get out, and so many people seem to want to get in (to work outside). I genuinely don't 100% get it.
- pydry 5y ago
  I noticed when I last visited that many uber rides were like, 2.50 eur. Kind of makes sense in that context. If youve got money the country is great. If you need to earn it it sucks.
- maxlamb 5y ago
  I think the reason is that the majority of people moving in to Portugal are nomads who already have high salaries, and the Portuguese trying to get out either have low salaries or are unemployed.
  - jorl17 5y ago
    Most of my friends are very much employed, pretty smart (they'd get a job pretty much anywhere, probably FAANG, too) and they are either out of the country or want to get out. In general, they want higher salaries (like you mentioned), but there also seems to be a clear disdain for most of the portuguese cultural heritage, to be honest. This might be an ecochamber (I'd put money on it being the case) but most people "around me" who are in "the tech world" are pretty much diametrically opposed to most portuguese customs and culture. They don't really identify with the country, the history, the religion, the folklore, the politics, the sports...and if you add the income disparity to it, it makes sense that they want to leave. If not for the will of my Significant Others throughout the years, I would have definitely left a looooong time ago. (Man, I find it somewhat atrocious how much we like to tell the great stories of how we went and stole, raped, killed and enslaved during the time of the discoveries, all for our own pleasure (and that of our religion). I guess I can somewhat frame it in its time, but you will never hear me talk about our "great accomplishments" in that regard. I'm deeply ashamed of them, not proud.)

c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago

Hong Kong expats fleeing HK to Singapore are currently gentrifying the SG real estate market. HK'r's are accustomed to paying far more money for much less space. Add this with the fact the incoming HK'r's are effectively "panic leasing" anything they can get their hands on by offering way over the ask. I have friends who've had their rents increase from +30% to +115% when renewals come up.

et-al 5y ago
Please correct me, but I thought Singapore was already relatively expensive compared to the rest of Asia given its tax haven status.
- c_o_n_v_e_x 5y ago
  Yes, Singapore is expensive and getting worse. Low taxes are nice (for everyone except Americans). SG Citizens enjoy certain benefits like the ability to purchase subsidized housing which helps to reduce the cost of living. Foreigners such as myself are stuck with a high(er) cost of living due to housing and lack of access to local schools (read: expensive private international schools. Being a small island with a dense population, nearly everything is imported.
  - nmfisher 5y ago
    As someone currently living in Singapore, I can echo this.
  - devoutsalsa 5y ago
    I met a woman from Singapore who told me that their are ordinary cows in the Singapore zoo. A cow is considered exotic because there aren’t any cattle farms! I thought it was funny.
  - refurb 5y ago
    Us citizens can exclude $110k USD in foreign income and for Singapore $50k of housing expenses, so $160k USD or $220k SGD. Massive tax benefits for Americans too.

foogazi 5y ago

Did you change the title ?

softcactus 5y ago

Expats? You mean immigrants?

woleium 5y ago
Migrant workers?
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
  They're here to pick your SEO strategies.
kmonsen 5y ago
No this is white people
- sfmike 5y ago
  "white" people can't immigrate? Are they immobile ? What's preventing them from immigrating?
  - elevaet 5y ago
    They were being facetious, it's a critique of the racist/classist tendency in our language to label people with brown skin living in another country as "immigrants" but white people as "ex-pats". It's related to the history of WASP colonialism.
    - _v7gu 5y ago
      I think they tread the line in reverse here: I don't think LA Times would put out news that call for immigrants to "go home" but it's fair game when they call them expats.
  - imran-iq 5y ago
    They don't like being called immigrants since they use it in a mostly negative context, so they are expats :)

fernly 5y ago

For those intrigued, Greece has a "Golden Visa" program with a mere €250,000 buy-in. Spain has one at €500,000, same as Portugal. I would think Spain, with its larger cities and a language that is more familiar to most Californians than Portuguese, would have greater appeal. Ireland offers an "investor" residency program with a €1M buy-in. Just as charming and scenic, although worse weather, plus they speak something very like English <jk>. All of these countries, as well as New Zealand and Australia, offer residency to people of working age with professional qualifications in any of a long list of skills.

edmcnulty101 5y ago
Do you have to pay 250,000 for the Visa? Or just have that much in your bank account?
- mdorazio 5y ago
  See here: https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/eu-golden-visas/greece-golden-visa/ https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/eu-golden-visas/greece-gold... It’s effectively a 250k investment requirement (property purchase of similar). So it’s not a net worth thing.
- tananaev 5y ago
  Usually you need to invest it, but not sure about this specific program. Rental property is a good investment if you want a relatively safe, easy and stable option.
- Gys 5y ago
  In Portugal it has to be an investment (350K+ depending on where) which ideally is a house. Purchased with the visa in mind, has to be mentioned in the contract. You should involve a lawyer for that. The house (or apartment) can have a mortgage and be rented out. I learned this from selling a house in Cascais to a Taiwanees woman.
Natsu 5y ago
The US has a similar sort of visa for foreign investors, I think it's this one: https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/permanent-workers/eb-5-immigrant-investor-program https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/permanent...

United857 5y ago

https://archive.ph/IJKQi https://archive.ph/IJKQi

lifeplusplus 5y ago

Gentrification isn't a bad thing or not any worse than what has been happening. Take Brooklyn in NYC it went from.. British farmers, to Irish, to black, to Jewish, to Russians, to Spanish... Things change world changes everything changes

sometimeshuman 5y ago

I think people from coastal California, such as the couple featured in the article, take for granted the spontaneous joy when random friends and family pop into the city, because of a work trip for example, and try to meet up. And then proceed to have a deep meaningful conversation in your native language where you get each other's references, figures of speech, jokes, and are generally on the same wavelength. It seems shortsighted to move to tiny coastal city in Europe that you can probably see in a weekend visit, where you rarely get to express yourself in your own language, spending years constantly frustrating and annoying people when speaking their language, having no cultural attachment, possibly destroying your career, and the sinking feeling that you may never see most of your friends and family again let alone that exciting spontaneous visit. I thought it was because you could get a place on the beach at a considerably lower price than California but the city mentioned, Cascais, seems similarly priced. The lower crime rate is a compelling reason to move but still seems insufficient.

dimmke 5y ago
Portugal seriously sucks. The food is bad, and yeah you can see about all there is to see in both Lisboa and Porto in under a week. I was really turned off when I went there in November. I think it's a magnet for this stuff because it's cheaper than the rest of Europe and the government has openly marketed itself to this kind of thing (to the detriment of the citizens, who are being priced out of housing and a lot of whom are leaving for other countries.)
- deanCommie 5y ago
  > The food is bad Dear, your credibility: Goodbye.
  - nmfisher 5y ago
    Never been, but after visiting Spain last year, I struggle to believe Portugal has bad food.
    - 5y ago

DeathArrow 5y ago

>She also wanted her son to have free college tuition in EU nations once the family gains citizenship. As I see it, immigrants from the US have something to do win from this deal: better way of leaving, affordable homes, lower prices, safety, free healthcare, free tuition, citizenship in EU. I wonder what's in it for the Europeans. As it seems, the Portuguese people have to deal with higher home prices, higher food prices, but maybe there is an upside for them too?

nine_zeros 5y ago
Portuguese economy gets a boost. In an aging society, immigration is the only way to maintain economic activity and pay our pensions/benefits.
FinnKuhn 5y ago
Most European countries have an ever ageing population, so immigration can help counter that trend. Additionally there are labour shortages all over and the taxes immigrants pay also help the country.
scotty79 5y ago
> I wonder what's in it for the Europeans. Money. That's what Americans are good for. Bringing in money they earned elsewhere. And that money (while it raises prices) ends up in the hands of local companies, landlords and governments.
- maa5444 5y ago

DeathArrow 5y ago

>Within the mix of retirees, digital nomads and young families fed up with issues including the costs of housing and healthcare, Trumpian politics and pandemic policies, Given that Trump is not the president since a long time and California is the most progressive US state, I'd think that Californians are fleeing progressive politics, not Trumpian politics.

otterley 5y ago
Californians are fleeing high prices, not progressive politics. The progressive politics there have attracted people for decades, so much so that it’s become unaffordable.
- refurb 5y ago
  Yeah, no. Paying $3M for a house in SF but public schools aren’t an option because “math is racist” is fleeing progressive politics.
  - otterley 5y ago
    Show me your data, and I’ll validate your claim. The great weight of stories published on this question indicates that people are vacating to live less expensively/more lavishly, not to be with people less politically progressive. Are there a few such people? Sure. But they’re hardly the majority. There are a lot of reasons why people choose not to send their kids to public school. Sometimes it’s because they perceive the public school as unsafe. The primary reason isn’t because parents disagree with the math curriculum, but because they want to give their kids a leg up in the fiercely competitive race to get into a top university. When everyone around you is wealthy and smart, parents try to find whatever advantage they can.
    - refurb 4y ago
      “Parents want schools that are safe, they want their kids good at math”. Two things progressive schools don’t offer.

EdwardDiego 5y ago

I've always loved how migrants become expats when they're white. I had thought it was exclusively a preserve of the British in anywhere in Europe that's sunny, and people who moved to Singapore or Dubai for the money, but hey, welcome to the club, Californians into yoga!

hnhg 5y ago
It’s introducing a class system into migration. One must signal they’re not part of the riffraff.
- uuee 4y ago
emteycz 5y ago
That's not true. I know plenty of non-white expats. At least here it's about money, not skin color.
wenc 5y ago
I think expatriate actually has a different shade of meaning from migrant. Expats are typically people living outside their country on a non-permanent basis (on assignment or some temporary basis), with no intention to permanent emigrate to the country. Immigrants however are people who move to a country with the intention of settling there permanently. From the article's description, it sounds like these folks are expats, probably in Portugal on a D7 or Golden Visa (both are temporary visas). Some may elect to apply for citizenship after a period of residency (5 years), in which case they would become immigrants if the choose to remain. I guess some just stay long enough to get an EU passport, and then they buzz off -- then they wouldn't be migrants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriate
- heavenlyblue 4y ago
  I would say migrants are those who are planning to integrate, if not always culturally then at least economically in the future country. Expats are those who are neither looking for work, learn the language or associate themselves with the locals, add to local culture.

scotty79 5y ago

Does Portugal still have 0% tax on money earned from selling cryptocurrencies?

mderazon 4y ago
They are going to change it to 28%

zmibes 5y ago

"Californians are making themselves known in a country once considered the forgotten sibling of Spain." What does that even mean? Anyway. Rich foreigners make capital city too expensive for some locals. Hardly news. Come, learn Portuguese, have fun and spend your money. Portugal is a sovereign(ish) nation. Let them accept immigration as they wish. This theatrical hand-wringing doesn't help anyone.

madduci 4y ago

This story looks like a repetition of the playbook seen in Berlin along all these years. Once defined the Startup Heaven, now the housing market is hotter than ever and rents are skyrocketing too. A lot of people can't deal or afford the rent anymore, building new apartments is going at a slow pace and whenever a new housing project comes out, it's already sold out. Some houses have reached the 1 Million Euro price. Lisbon is set to follow this same path which will make everything worse for people already living there.

tormeh 4y ago
The capital and biggest city of Germany was always going to be expensive. IMO the capital shouldn’t have been moved back to Berlin. Anyway, that’s too late now. What I’d like to see is administration and ministries moved far out of the city into Brandenburg.

hackbinary 4y ago

People calling themselves "expats" is a bad look. Expats are immigrants.