The Portuguese can no longer afford to live in Portugal

It's not hard! We knew how to build a lot of housing on a particular parcel a hundred years ago.

There are also countries like France which only imported cheap and poor labor. France never tried or even discouraged rich people to settle in the country with punitive taxes (compared to our neighbors and other western world countries). For instance London has (or had) rich Russians/Indians/Pakistani investors who made London their residence, not the case for Paris, foreign real estate owners don't take French permanent residency.

And nowadays, we are left with some politicians who promote economic immigration even when there is no need or deny any form of control on illegal immigration mostly to import voters.

Flint's population has rapidly declined over the past 40 years and continues to decline (its population is less than half of what it was at its peak), so there's not a population boom driving up demand. Flint is not exactly known as a tourist destination either. And to top off, Flint is most well known for its contaminated drinking water that contains lead. So why on Earth would such a place be experiencing a housing shortage?

The obvious answer is that governments around the world have brought interests rate down to zero, which forces investors to seek out riskier and riskier assets to invest in. Instead of investing in traditionally safe assets like treasuries and bonds, investors now have no choice but to invest in stuff like tech startups, cryptocurrencies, personal loans, mortgage-backed securities, and dilapidated houses in the Midwest.

That's one of the reasons why portuguese renting market is so bad. There were rent control policies for like 40 years. It has been phased out but the market still has the signs of its damages.

There also other contributing policies and the policies change almost every two years.

I'm one that could invest in the market, to bring more houses to be rent, but I can not risk 150 000 euros buying a house to rent (middle income market) and then having problems evicting with a non-paying renter, being forbidden to increase the rent due a new law or god help me if I need to use the court system to ask for renter damages.

> It's barely right/left at all, it's just nihilistic power as its own end.

These statements are skillfully leaving out "ethno" part of nationalism. Once you add that quite obviously real and active element back, it's very much a left/right difference.

The left's solution to the problems brought about by globalization is to subtly bias the scales of re-industrialization policies toward the domestic labor market - evidenced by things like the battery materials sourcing and assembly location requirements, and income limits of the recently passed EV tax credits.

The right's solution to this has been playing on fears of a purported invasion by non-white citizens from lower income countries. A decade ago that would have been a controversial claim to make about the right, but today's right openly proclaims those ideas.

Portugal's case is interesting because they lived under a nationalist dictatorship that only ended in 1968, so many people alive today remember living under that. In my travel there, I found that many people in the age groups that vote heavily conservatively in the US and UK instead vote democratic left as a result of their lived memories of nationalist dictatorship.

Portugal does need to figure out what else has to offer the world economically in addition to great weather and beautiful cities and countryside, in order to have a better balance of trade, but it's unrealistic to think it can do that while shutting down immigration.