Which is a sentiment I wouldn't dismiss. If you have visited Singapore and SF the contrast will hit you in your face hard. To US folks, Singaporeans lack political freedom. To Singaporeans, US friends lack a clean habitat, safety, healthcare, and bunch of other factors that should be a given in modern society. They see the sad wealth gap here (and hence the influence of money on democracy), the growing idiocracy, and a country once on top now sadly in fast decline. So maybe we should hear them out and learn the good parts.
The wealth gap in Singapore is immense as well, but they have different (and derogatory) terminology to refer to it.
For example, the city is built by immigrant workers often from Bangladesh. You should see the living conditions they are forced to endure. It's shameful.
During Covid, they don't even refer to these hard-working people as being members of the community, and they segregated the Covid case counts by those who were and were not a part of society, in their eyes.
How much of an impact would you say it has on the index? If it were normalized for “citizens only” do you really think US will fare much better?
If your larger point is about treatment of immigrants, how do you feel about US taxing its immigrants as citizens after 1 yr of stay, but putting them on a line to actual citizenship that could be more than multiple lifetimes long? Didn’t we fight a war about “taxation without representation”? I’m not even talking about literally tearing apart poor immigrant families while all along extracting taxes from them.
You seem to be talking about a lot of different things that are not a coherent part of this discussion. But taking one point:
> line to actual citizenship that could be more than multiple lifetimes long
I'm not sure what you are referring to: almost every immigrant I know in the U.S. who wanted to pursue citizenship got it after at most 7 years in the country, sometimes less. That's a normal time range for most Western countries.
It only appears incoherent because you might have conflated two issues in your response (wealth gap and plight of immigrants). Not saying you did it intentionally.
Regarding immigrants, you need to meet more of them to get a better idea. The situation in US is much worse than most western countries. I encourage you to read up on why it is such a massive political issue (Obama's attempted reforms and executive orders, Dreamers, Path to citizenship etc.). Here is one example: https://www.cato.org/blog/150-year-wait-indian-immigrants-ad...
I have been to Singapore and my take on this is that the Bay Area has Valley Fair and Santana Row and the US has DisneyWorld too... enforced clean, structured, sanitized places are not in short supply in the United States.
