What happens when an American busker meets an Angolan rapper who raps with a Moroccan singer who sings in Darija Arabic? 👆🏽 … 🔥🔥🔥 … 🗽
Minimum wage is rooted in domestic labor policy whereas globalist connotes geopolitical identity. Through the practical lens of everyday life trajectories, the two topics converge around a single question: how should societies arrange labor, mobility, and policy to permit people to live with dignity?
Minimum wage is commonly framed as the moral floor for compensation aka the bare minimum required to survive.
While morally convenient it’s simply not true. The minimum wage functions as a supply-side constraint imposed by law. It mandates a lower bound on what employers must pay hourly workers. The framing matters because of the consequences of the policy. Employers in search of efficiency (many of them) reduce hours, automate tasks and ask more experienced workers to do more.
If the minimum wage is $16 then people who would have worked at $15 become priced out of formal employment. Also people are not perpetually minimum-wage workers. Earnings change across life seasons. Framing the minimum-wage worker as a static, lifelong class misleads public debate.
At the same time, we can’t ignore the reality of the U.S. economy over the past 50 years. A median American earning $48,000 or less in major American cities is economically challenged.
Think Global, Act Local Global
Modern border controls are only 100 years old: crystallized after World War I. Before this, global movement and relocation was constrained by money and transportation, not passport photos and visas.
The stereotype of the globalist as a shadowy elite misses a more productive egalitarian option. We might accurately redefine globalist as a pragmatic actor who treats national borders as constraints to be weighed against opportunities. People with modest nominal incomes (e.g. $48,000) can live comfortable and even affluent lives in regions with lower costs of living.
A rough way to think about it is that a worker who averaged on the order of $45,000–$50,000 per year over their career could end up with a Social Security benefit around $17,000 per year.
Colombia offers a retirement (pensionado) migrant visa that can lead to a resident (Type R) visa after several years of continuous stay, IF you can show a stable pension of at least three times Colombia’s current legal monthly minimum wage.
—> roughly 1,300–1,400 USD per month.
—> annualize that to get 15,600–16,800 USD per year.
This isn’t theoretical and Colombia is not the only option, although possibly one of the best ones for Americans.
It is not only the ultra-wealthy who can move where their money buys more. Nobody in America “deserves” to be here other than our indigenous friends. The rest of us ended up here because of our ancestors’ decisions or curses.
For the record I am grateful to be born where I was born.
Migration is an economic strategy more than a political or cultural signifier. People move for better wages, lower costs, and improved quality of life. It should be a rational adaptation to geographic opportunity. As national identity becomes even more confusing as it merges with multi-cultural identities we have to address the practical question: How might someone today responsibly secure a better life for themselves and their descendants?
Music:
@ariatinsta is worth a follow: he brings people together through music.
