People everywhere make best use of opportunities that come their way.
Opportunities naturally challenge minds to extract the best from each, but it’s the ultimate aims that determine how the challenge is met.
Driven by such challenges, people everywhere tend to seek ‘Lifetime Opportunities’ and duly follow their dreams to Lands of Milk and Honey, largely in colder climes, ever-ignoring The Green, Green Grass of Home.
Pursuing their life’s dreams in faraway lands, migrants have historically also been taken advantage of by criminals in the human trafficking business, who mostly start the turning of many dreams into lifelong nightmares.
Most don’t flee with malicious intent — mainly to help families back home — but are also also encouraged (even legally assisted) to take advantage of the loopholes in the social systems of the Lands of Opportunity they adopt.
Invited to and promised embracing welcomes in the new and distant Lands of The Free and Homes of The Brave, where Fraternity, Justice and Equality coexist in supposedly the world’s Greatest Democracies, immigrants naturally adapt and adopt to serve their new motherlands and fruitfully live the lives they dreamed of at home, many eventually anchoring their futures in the adopted lands.
People in the Global South have always been enticed to ‘Go Up North’ for better futures, whether driven through the continuing Brain Drain, or by personal ambition.
Over time, growing numbers (and their naturalized families) started drawing negative attention for seeming to progress faster and better than those who, like in every system, also fall through the cracks.
Anti-immigrant entities and spokespersons cite violence and crime to include law-abiding immigrants in the broad-brush backlashes that came with the likes of Brexit and Trump’s mass arrests and enforced deportations through outsourcing, while steadily withdrawing America’s debt to those who built the US, as the new imperial emperor who’ll ‘Make America Great Again’.
But before all that, there’ll always be those the-world-over who’ll be forever keen on learning new ways to ‘beat the system’ at home, to ‘save’ or ‘earn’ money, to ‘get for free’ what they’d normally have to pay for, to gain ‘special treatment’ from well-placed friends, or to simply not pay taxes due.
Indeed, ‘Smart people’ who deliberately exploit the legal interpretive differences between ‘evading’ and ‘avoiding’ taxes are patted on the back for denying the Treasury its due.
For example, during one of the 2020 debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton while campaigning for the presidency, the First Lady who became a Secretary of State asked the casino owner who wrote ‘The Art of the Deal’ why he wasn’t ‘in jail’ for not paying his due taxes to Uncle Sam.
Trump replied: “Because I’m smart!”
Not only was the billionaire applauded for outsmarting the taxman, but he went on to win the election race between two top representatives of the two parties that run America like wings of the same bird.
It would turn out that the Clintons would be accused by the Trumps knocking on the White House doors, of ‘taking advantage’ of their presidential status to groom their daughter Chelsea, to start a new presidential family, like the Roosevelts, Kennedys and Bushes before them.
But ‘taking advantage’ of ‘opportunities’ is not a class thing.
Instead, it’s a general human character flaw that passes as normal, sensibly and senselessly encouraged and discouraged (accordingly), with ‘being smart’ always encouraged to be emulated – never frowned-upon.
This (taking advantage) syndrome is described differently in different countries worldwide, in most cases with creolized adjectives that arise from a local experience.
In Saint Lucia, it’s called a ‘Bwa’ – using your ‘good sense’ to exploit an available opportunity, for profit or property.
But similar schemes and scheming mindsets also exist everywhere on Planet Earth, each with a local descriptive name.
A few global examples:
• Long-term tenants who’ve benefitted from decades of subsidized government housing estates, who’ve acquired private properties elsewhere and put them on the rental market, will insist they must first be provided with ‘alternative house and land’, if asked to vacate (even for needier persons)
• Legal and Illegal squatters occupying state lands, if asked to vacate for national development purposes, similarly expect — and demand — alternative land-and-house compensation
• Vendors using municipal facilities with years of payments arrears choose to await the next General Elections, when politicians will offer to ‘forgive’ (cancel) their debts — if elected
• Parents who can otherwise afford find ways to care for their children will still source cash payments from elected parliamentarians for everything, from Christenings and First Communions, to weddings and funerals
• Constituents expect to be rewarded by winning parties in cash and/or kind for their votes, demanding ‘contracts’ as ‘a fair exchange’
• Doctors will provide ‘sick leave’ certificates to fit-and-well patients, to mutually benefit from scheming through a legal requirement for a ‘health certificate’
• European empires give special treatment to children born in their overseas colonies – especially to prepare the new ‘boys’ for army life, leading to parents from near and far naturally welcoming the opportunity to ‘take advantage’ of an available opening for a better future for their children – and themselves
• The USA gave Birth-Right citizenship to children ‘Born in America’ — irrespective of their parents’ immigration status — leading to a similar case of parents from nations the-world-over flocking to pursue their American Dream by droves, across seas, skies and borders, including risking children’s lives on perilous journeys
The world’s richest nations have historically depended on immigrants to do the dirty work their citizens won’t for the wages they underpay for migrant labour.
But, in all cases – bar none — the perpetrators and beneficiaries care-not about the effects of their actions on government’s ability to collect the taxes required to pay for the subsidies they enjoy and the free services they demand in health, education and provision of financial support for the poor.
To them, ‘taking advantage’ is just a way of life!