Have you heard this before? If you have ever moved to another country and had the misfortune of criticizing the local taxes, bureaucracy, or healthcare out loud, you have likely faced a similar storm of indignation in response. Moreover, this is said by local “patriots” and even other immigrants, who apparently suffer from a severe form of Stockholm syndrome.
For some reason, in the minds of authoritarian etatists, the state is a kind of sacred deity. A strict but fair father who, out of great mercy, “took in” the poor orphan immigrant. Consequently, the orphan must fall prostrate, kiss the ground, and keep quiet. Only we understand that this is all nonsense that does not fit into common sense.
Imagine that you checked into an expensive hotel. You paid for the room a month in advance and left a deposit. You enter, and the faucet is leaking, the Wi-Fi only works on the balcony, and cockroaches are running down the hallway. You go down to the reception to express your dissatisfaction. And suddenly some guy in the lobby screams at you: “How dare you complain?! If you don’t like the hotel, go sleep on a heating pipe! Be grateful that you were even given keys!” Sounds like the rambling of a madman? But it is exactly the same as the phrase “if you don’t like it, leave.”
It is also necessary to understand that immigration is by no means “charity.” Modern legal immigration is a harsh, pragmatic, and very expensive procedure. The state is effectively selling you access to “its” infrastructure. And it certainly does not lose a single cent in the process.
You pay for this access long before your foot touches the new land. You pay visa fees, document translations, agent services, language tests, and medical examinations. You go through a rigorous administrative filter that checks your health, education, lack of criminal records, and ability to bring in money. The state power of the country lets you in not because it is kind. It is simply because you are a ready-made, trained taxpayer at someone else’s expense with minimal risks for the system.
Does this end upon arrival? Not at all. At that moment, an invisible counter starts. Your life in the new country has a specific price—the cost of one hour of life. Calculate your rent, utilities, insurance, groceries, gasoline, taxes, and divide by 30 days, then by 24 hours. You will get the amount you owe this system simply for the right to breathe its air. Even when you sleep or are sick, your counter ticks. You continuously pour money into the local economy as a customer of banks, supermarkets, insurance companies, and landlords, who, by the way, pay exorbitant taxes. Even if you personally do not work “on the books,” these taxes are already included in the price of goods and services.
So why on earth should a client, who regularly pays the “subscription fee” (in the form of huge taxes and the cost of living), not have the right to say that the service is, to put it mildly, mediocre? State lovers adore the proverb “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” Only the horse was never a gift; it was bought at a double rate. And we have every right to be outraged if the horse is defective.
Citizenship, by the way, also changes nothing fundamentally. A passport is not the end of the game or an indulgence from levies, but simply “premium access” within the framework of the same contract. Once the counter is started, no one will ever turn it off.
Therefore, to the words of a defender of the stationary bandit saying “pack your bags,” you can boldly ask—are you saying this to the investors who invested their capital, their brains, and their time in this country? People have every right to demand quality service, be outraged by high taxes, and criticize unfair laws. In any language and in any part of the globe, regardless of their origin and the color of their passport!
