Jason Y writes:
Also, imagine what Latin American immigrants think about the US welfare state? I mean, no shit. Of course, they’re going to overload welfare. They probably think they’re in paradise. I mean they came from right wing BDSM style hell-holes, where the wealthy 2 percent gives them nothing.
In Mexico, there is always health care at the state owned clinics. You might have to stand in line all day, but you will get seen. And everyone has food in Mexico. If you can’t make it in the city, you just go out to the rural areas and work on an ejido. The state owns a lot of the rural land in Mexico and they have divided up this land into plots called ejidos. They are sort of like small villages with lots of farmland all around them. The farmland is all owned by the state. You work the land and get whatever food you raise off the land. This is one of the legacies of the revolution.
So it is like China in that sense that if you can’t make it in the city, you can always go out to the rural areas and survive. I believe that all public education in Mexico is also free too, all the way up to university level. They have recently been talking about putting in a fee system, but they had to back down after a lot of protests.
Venezuela now has a fairly well developed welfare state and Argentina and Uruguay have had them for a long time, battered as they are.
Costa Rica had a welfare state for a long time except in the 1980’s under Reagan there was tremendous pressure to get rid of it. I am not sure what has happened since.
I believe that most of those countries do have free state health care and often free university education. But there might not be any doctors around and the university and health systems may be very much underfunded.