Americans living in red states take heed: If your Republican governors are attempting to woo businesses and their employees from California, it is probably time to rethink that strategy.
The country of Portugal is providing a case study.
According to Fox News, Portuguese are becoming fed up with the left-wing nonsensical behavior and attitudes California ex-pats who have moved there brought with them, and they’d like those Americans to leave their country:
California residents are fleeing to the country of Portugal and in many cases bringing problems that have made life more difficult for natives, according to the Los Angeles Times report.
A story titled “Welcome to Portugal, the new expat haven. Californians, please go home,” reports that the number of Americans living in Portugal has risen by 45% in the past year with many of those Americans moving from California in order to escape high housing costs, pandemic lockdowns, and “Trumpian politics” in the United States.
(Editor’s Note: There are no ‘Trumpian politics’ in California. It is governed by a Democrat supermajority, which includes a majority of midsized-to-major cities.)
The story goes on to explain that “resentment of newcomers is growing” in Portugal because California expats are at the “root of questions over gentrification, income disparities, and immigration” (that last ‘concern’ proving again that California Dems are tone-deaf hypocrites), with Fox News adding:
Portuguese activists have reportedly taken to the streets to protest the gentrification caused by Americans, many of them Californians, who have moved into the neighborhood and caused skyrocketing rent and evictions.
“You cannot deny that places like Lisbon have become much more appealing for young, creative people with money to spend. The effect on the economy and the way the buildings look — no longer empty — is astronomical,” Luis Mendes, a geographer at the University of Lisbon, told the Los Angeles Times. “But the average Portuguese person can no longer afford to live in the center of Lisbon. Rents have gone up five times over a few years. Even the basic things, such as buying groceries, take longer trips outside the city center than they used to.”
Seems like the Portuguese like capitalism after all.
In response to the new housing crisis, the government has suspended its “golden visa” program in Portugal’s biggest cities that were offering residency to foreign nationals who bought houses that cost more than 500,000 euros, a program that was being “dominated” by Americans.
In the capital of Lisbon, evictions skyrocketed to more than double over the past few years as Portuguese citizens complained that they were caused by the influx of foreigners willing to pay more than locals and whose bank accounts were backed by dollars and pounds.
California’s population decreased in both 2020 and 2021 which cost the state a seat in Congress for the first time after the U.S. Census found California’s population growth fell behind other states, Fox News noted.
“Things were just becoming too much back home, but I didn’t want to leave everything about L.A. behind,” California expat Jamie Dixon explained. “With Portugal, we could keep the parts we liked and leave the rest.”
But not without bringing some of the worst parts of Democrat-dominated California with them, apparently.
