From the article:

In 1955, American state psychiatric hospitals held 559,000 patients. As of 2023, the number was around 36,000. If you adjust for population growth, that’s a decline from roughly 340 beds per 100,000 people to fewer than 11. Over the same period, the number of Americans experiencing homelessness on any given night has climbed to 771,480, the highest figure since HUD began counting in 2007. Of the individuals counted, about one in three, met HUD’s definition of chronic homelessness: a disability plus at least a year without stable housing.

These two trends are not unrelated, and the refusal to connect them is one of the great policy failures of modern America.

The story usually starts with President Kennedy. In 1963, he signed the Community Mental Health Act, legislation animated by a decent impulse: the large state psychiatric institutions of mid-century America were often nightmarish. Patients were warehoused in overcrowded wards, subjected to restraints, given ice baths, and sometimes left to languish for decades. The exposé journalism of the era, from Albert Deutsch’s The Shame of the States to Geraldo Rivera’s 1972 broadcast from Willowbrook, showed the public what “institutional care” often meant in practice. The revulsion was justified.

The plan was elegant on paper. Close the asylums. Build 1,500 community mental health centers across the country where people could receive outpatient treatment, crisis intervention, and rehabilitation while living at home or in small group settings. The large institutions would empty; the community infrastructure would catch them.

Only about half the planned centers were ever built. None were funded to the level the original promise required. Kennedy was assassinated the same year he signed the act, and subsequent administrations did not sustain the commitment. The introduction of Medicaid in 1965 gave states a perverse financial incentive to discharge patients faster: Medicaid’s “Institutions for Mental Diseases” (IMD) exclusion prohibited federal reimbursement for psychiatric care in facilities with more than 16 beds, which meant states bore the full cost of every patient in a state hospital. Move those patients to smaller community settings or general hospitals, and the federal government would pick up a share. States obliged. They closed the hospital beds. They did not invest the savings in the community infrastructure that was supposed to replace them.

Here is what the 2024 JAMA Psychiatry meta-analysis by Rebecca Barry and colleagues found when they pooled 85 studies covering 48,414 individuals across high-income countries: 67 percent of people experiencing homelessness currently have a mental health disorder. The lifetime prevalence is 77 percent. Substance use disorders top the list at 44 percent, followed by antisocial personality disorder (26 percent), major depression (19 percent), bipolar disorder (8 percent), and schizophrenia (7 percent). The rates among men are even higher: 86 percent lifetime prevalence.

The clinical term is anosognosia, from the Greek for “without knowledge of disease.” Approximately 50 to 60 percent of people with schizophrenia have it to some degree, and about 30 percent have severe, chronic anosognosia. They do not believe they are ill. This isn’t denial in the psychological sense, the kind where you know what’s wrong but refuse to face it. It’s a neurological impairment linked to dysfunction in the brain’s frontal lobe, affecting the ability for self-reflection and metacognition. The person with severe anosognosia who hears voices and believes the government is monitoring their thoughts does not register these as symptoms. They register them as reality. Telling them they need medication is, from their subjective perspective, like a stranger telling you that your own perceptions are hallucinations and you should take drugs to make them stop.

But look at what has happened in the absence of those beds. We haven’t liberated people with severe mental illness. We’ve relocated them, from hospitals to sidewalks, jails, and emergency rooms. The question isn’t whether people with treatment-resistant schizophrenia and chronic anosognosia will be institutionalized. They already are. The question is whether they’ll be institutionalized in places designed to treat them or in places designed to punish them.

But the civil liberties argument has a blind spot. It treats refusal of treatment as an expression of autonomous choice without reckoning with the fact that in severe anosognosia, the capacity for that choice is critically impaired by the very illness in question. When a person with a gangrenous leg refuses amputation because they believe their leg is fine, we don’t simply respect that refusal and send them home. We recognize that their perception is compromised and act accordingly. The brain is an organ, and when it is severely impaired by schizophrenia in ways that destroy the capacity for self-recognition, the ethical calculus of “respecting autonomy” changes.

If you had a family member with severe schizophrenia, hallucinating on a street corner in February, refusing food and medication because they believed the food was poisoned and the medication was a government plot, what would you want the system to do?

Most people, across the political spectrum, would not want the system to hand them a pamphlet about available services and walk away. They would want someone to intervene, to get their family member off the street, into a warm, safe, clinical setting, and onto medication that could, over weeks or months, restore enough insight for them to begin making informed decisions about their own care.

That intervention barely exists in America today. We have the pharmacological tools: clozapine for treatment-resistant schizophrenia, long-acting injectable antipsychotics for patients whose illness derails medication adherence. We have the knowledge. What we lack is the political will to build the infrastructure, because sixty years ago we closed a system that was broken, replaced it with nothing adequate, and then reframed that failure as freedom.

The 152,000 chronically homeless Americans are not free. They are abandoned.

And every year we don’t build the treatment infrastructure they need, the bill comes due in emergency rooms, jail cells, and frozen bodies on sidewalks. We can argue about the design of the system, the scope of involuntary treatment powers, the funding mechanisms, and the oversight structures. Those are worthwhile arguments. But we should stop pretending that the status quo, roughly 36,000 psychiatric beds for a nation of over 340 million, represents a considered policy choice rather than a catastrophic failure of political will.

We closed the mental hospitals. The streets became the wards. It is long past time to build something better.

Trump's "escalate to deescalate" strategy seems to have either worked or given him cover for backing down, but we should still see nuclear threats as unacceptably dangerous.

There is an irony buried in Hungarian political history. Fidesz—the Viktor Orbán-led party that has ruled with a supermajority for the last 16 years, reshaping Hungary’s constitution, packing its courts, weakening its free press, and gradually hollowing out most institutions that might check its power—is an acronym in Hungarian for “the Alliance of Young Democrats.” Founded in 1988 by students who gathered in clandestine groups to resist a communist government, Fidesz was initially conceived as a direct challenge to authoritarian rule. Orbán, one of its founders, even accepted a fellowship from George Soros (a man he would later demonize) to study civil society at Oxford.

On April 12, Hungarians will go to the polls to take part in what is shaping up to be the most consequential election the country has seen since its democratic transition in 1990—one that could end Orbán’s long grip on power. Recent polling shows just one in five voters under the age of 40 backing Fidesz. Orbán has been reduced to pleading with parents on the campaign trail to drive home the stakes to their adult children. Fidesz is no longer in any meaningful sense an “Alliance of Young Democrats”—and hasn’t been in a long time. In fact, it has become the very political machine it was originally created to dismantle.

Orbán’s tenure has evolved into an experiment in illiberalism within the European Union—an “illiberal state,” in his own words—that he has sought to export as an election-proof model for nationalist allies like Donald Trump. But the experiment may be about to blow up, and the consequences could extend far beyond the borders of this small central European country.

A Perilous Pardon

The deepest single wound to Orbán’s political standing—whether or not it ultimately proves fatal—was self-inflicted: a presidential pardon. In February 2024, the Hungarian investigative outlet 444 revealed that Hungarian President Katalin Novák—whose role in national politics is largely ceremonial—had quietly freed a man convicted of helping cover up systematic child sexual abuse at a state-run orphanage. The pardoned man, a deputy director of a children’s home, had pressured victims to retract their testimonies against the institution’s director, who was convicted of abusing at least 10 children between 2004 and 2016. Novák had granted the pardon in April 2023 and kept it secret.

The public reaction was volcanic. Protests erupted in Budapest demanding Novák’s resignation, with an enormous demonstration on Heroes’ Square called the “Monsters Walk Outside Protest.” Also implicated was Judit Varga, a key Fidesz figure who had certified the pardon as Hungary’s then-minister of justice. She had been expected to lead Fidesz’s list for the European Parliament elections; Orbán himself had called her a “born talent” who “possessed everything required for somebody to take charge of a country.” Both women resigned within days.

The scandal was revealing in multiple ways. Here was a government that had built its entire political identity on the defense of Christian families and the protection of children, and it had quietly freed a child abuse accomplice. But equally significant was what happened next: Varga’s ex-husband, a Fidesz insider named Péter Magyar, went public. In a bombshell interview with the independent Hungarian media outlet Partizán that reached nearly 2.7 million views, Magyar described the government as a “political facade” designed to conceal the machinations of those in power and amass vast fortunes for them. He then organized a rally on March 15, 2024, attended by tens of thousands.

From that moment, Hungary had a proper opposition. Magyar wasted no time converting popular rage into institutional power. Just four months after announcing his party, Tisza won nearly a third of the vote in the June 2024 European Parliament elections, securing seven seats, the highest share won by any non-Fidesz party since 2006. Fidesz, meanwhile, took under 45% and 11 seats, its worst-ever performance in an EU election. The result gave Magyar members of the European Parliament (MEPs), resources, international credibility, and a platform in Brussels that previous Hungarian opposition parties had never possessed. It also confirmed something more fundamental: that Tisza was not a protest movement but a political party capable of competing in elections.

Appeasement Tour

Central to modern Hungarian politics is Orbán’s relationship with Hungary’s neighbor, Ukraine. Orbán has staked his reelection on passionate opposition to Western aid for Ukraine, personified by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom Fidesz billboards have plastered across the country with the slogan “Don’t let Zelenskyy have the last laugh.” Orbán claims EU alignment would bankrupt Hungary and send its young men to die. Hungary has been the only EU member state to refuse to allow weapons bound for Ukraine to transit its territory, and Orbán has repeatedly blocked and delayed EU sanctions packages and military aid.

The most brazen move came in July 2024, days into Hungary’s rotating presidency of the Council of the EU. Without consulting EU partners, Orbán flew to Kyiv, then Moscow to meet Putin, then Beijing to meet Xi Jinping, a self-proclaimed “peace mission” in which Putin suggested that Orbán was representing the European Council. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen dismissed it as “nothing but an appeasement mission.” In an unprecedented rebuke, EU member states refused to attend a strategic summit Hungary was scheduled to host, holding their own separate meeting instead.

Kleptocracy

Behind the geopolitical theater lies the economic reality that is making ordinary Hungarians increasingly furious. After contracting by 0.9% in 2023, Hungary’s economy grew by only 0.5% in 2024 and was projected at 0.4% in 2025, slower than the EU average, while the budget deficit is projected at 4.6% in 2025 and is expected to increase to 5.2% in 2026, significantly exceeding the EU’s 3% target. By some metrics including household consumption, at just 72% of the EU average, Hungary has become the poorest country in the bloc.

The figures are not abstractions. The village of Felcsút, population 1,800, is Orbán’s childhood home, which has transformed since 2010 into a personal fiefdom. Its soccer club, the Puskás Akadémia, has received hundreds of millions in state support through subsidies, tax schemes, and public sponsorships, despite average attendances of around 1,500 per match. Its stadium holds nearly twice the population of the town. EU funds also financed a 6-kilometer tourist railway between the stadium and a neighboring arboretum, declared a national priority investment, which has lost money every year since it opened. In other words, Orbán’s economic model is reminiscent of Third World potentates who’d rather shovel money into wasteful projects for favored constituencies and supporters rather than productive endeavors that benefit all Hungarians.

Then there is Lőrinc Mészáros, a former gas fitter and Orbán’s childhood friend, who rose to become Hungary’s wealthiest man, his fortune built almost exclusively on public contracts. Adjacent to his private estate sits a zoo—with zebras, antelopes—that became a national symbol of the ruling elite’s extravagance. In the summer of 2025, former Fidesz MP Ákos Hadházy organized public “safari tours” to the estate, as a form of protest—thousands of Hungarians came, in lines of cars stretching kilometers, to see for themselves what their taxes had built.

At the same time, approximately 19 billion euros in EU funds sit frozen over rule-of-law concerns—money that could have built hospitals and schools, locked away while the men around Orbán keep getting richer.

Spies, Secrets, and Sovereignty

The architecture of control did not stop at media—which Orbán coopted by placing loyalists in key positions across the country’s news outlets—or at money, which he shoveled to favored constituencies and cronies. In December 2023, Hungary passed the Sovereignty Protection Act, creating an office with sweeping powers to investigate any individual or organization receiving foreign funding deemed threatening to national sovereignty: targeting nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), journalists, academic institutions, and LGBTQ+ groups. Critics immediately compared it to Russia’s foreign agents law. The office’s first report named journalists from The New York Times and CNN alongside Hungarian NGO staff as threats to Hungarian sovereignty, prompting the European Commission to launch infringement proceedings against the law.

The proceedings were hardly overreach. The law’s purpose became even clearer on March 24 of this year. Hungarian investigative outlet Direkt36 reported that a covert operation had been run against Tisza’s IT infrastructure ahead of the election. Magyar called the scandal “Hungary’s Watergate” and a police detective publicly corroborated elements of the account. The government scrambled to offer a counter-narrative, claiming the IT specialists were Ukrainian agents who had infiltrated Tisza. But the explanation had an obvious flaw: if Ukraine was spying on a Hungarian political campaign, embedding agents in the party more sympathetic to Ukrainian interests was a peculiar way to do so.

Two days prior to the Direkt36 report, The Washington Post reported that Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó had been regularly briefing Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during breaks in Council of the EU meetings, passing live reports on closed-door discussions about sanctions and Ukraine aid. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the revelation “shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.” Szijjártó confirmed regular contact with Lavrov, framing it as normal diplomacy.

The Autocrat’s Network

For 16 years, Orbán has presented himself as the great protector of ethnic Hungarian minorities living beyond Hungary’s borders. The 1.2 million Hungarians in Transylvania have delivered near-unanimous support for Fidesz in Hungarian elections. But in 2025, that bond was tested. Orbán backed Romanian ultranationalist George Simion, even though he had led attacks on a Hungarian military cemetery in Transylvania and described the ethnic Hungarian party as a “hideous, chauvinistic creature”—likely calculating that a Simion presidency would pull Romania away from its staunchly pro-Ukraine, pro-NATO course and toward the Moscow-friendly axis Orbán had been cultivating. The response was telling: ethnic Hungarians voted overwhelmingly for Simion’s liberal opponent, Nicușor Dan, contributing decisively to his margin of victory. The communities Orbán claims to champion repudiated him—or at the very least declined to follow his lead after 16 years of doing so.

Internationally, Orbán’s camp has leaned into a broad coalition of nationalist allies. Endorsements arrived from Marine Le Pen, Alice Weidel, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Javier Milei. Vladimir Putin’s state media openly backs him. Trump has called Orbán “a great man” and today, JD Vance arrived in Budapest for a two-day visit—following Marco Rubio’s own trip in February—making the administration’s investment in an Orbán victory unmistakable.

The Washington Post also reported in March 2026 that Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service had internally proposed staging a false-flag assassination attempt on Orbán to improve his electoral odds. Then, with the election less than a week away, Serbian authorities announced the discovery of explosives near the Balkan Stream pipeline carrying Russian gas to Hungary. Orbán convened an emergency defense council and, while stopping short of a direct accusation, said the incident fit “into the chain” of Ukrainian actions against Hungarian energy supplies. But Magyar claimed to have seen it coming; posting on X that for weeks he had been receiving warnings that Orbán—with Serbian and Russian assistance—“may be planning to cross another line.”

What Comes Next

With the election mere days away, Politico’s Poll of Polls shows Tisza outpacing Fidesz by 10%. Late-deciding voters, who broke for Fidesz in 2022, now appear to be shifting toward Tisza. Partizán’s election meter, which aggregates multiple polls, projects a 78.5% chance that Tisza gains the majority.

But thanks to Fidesz’s self-serving electoral reforms that removed the ceiling on campaign spending and gerrymandered more than a third of electoral districts, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace estimates that an opposition party may need around 55% of the popular vote to secure a simple parliamentary majority; Fidesz could potentially win a supermajority with as little as 45%.

It is by no means certain, therefore, that Orbán will be defeated. Still, the question hanging over Hungary in the final week is one that would have been unthinkable two years ago: What happens if Orbán loses, and what if he refuses to leave? He is not Lukashenko or Maduro. Hungary remains an EU member state with international monitors and a business class with too much invested in European markets to stomach outright election theft.

But he is not without options. Fidesz has already amended electoral law twice since Magyar emerged, and more likely than outright refusal is that Orbán would use the outgoing parliament’s remaining weeks—in which his two-thirds majority still allows constitutional amendments—to lock Fidesz loyalists into the courts, regulatory bodies, and constitutional oversight mechanisms that no simple parliamentary majority can dislodge. That would effectively ensure that, even in opposition, Orbán’s system survives him.

The man who built Hungary’s system of illiberal democracy, gerrymandered constituencies, bought media empires, rewrote the constitution, turned EU funds into patronage, and expelled a Western university while welcoming a Chinese one in its place is discovering that systems of control have limits. Scandal after scandal—a pardoned child abuser, a spying operation against the opposition, NATO secrets passed to Moscow—might each have been managed in isolation. All of this, combined with an abysmal economy, has produced something Orbán’s machine was not designed to handle: a population that has simply stopped believing him.

If Orbán does lose, it will signal that there are limits to the ability of authoritarians in power even after they have consolidated their hold and rigged the playing field. The opposition faces an uphill task, but it can prevail with the right leader with a smart strategy. If the Hungarian opposition wins, it will offer hope and lessons to liberals world over engaged in a struggle against authoritarianism.

Hungary’s Viktor Orbán offered to go to great lengths to help Vladimir Putin, telling the Russian leader “I am at your service” in an October call, it has emerged, prompting further scrutiny of Budapest’s ties to the Kremlin just as JD Vance arrived in the city.

Air Force Two landed in Budapest on Tuesday morning carrying the US vice-president and his wife, Usha Vance, as Hungary reaches the final, heated days of a hard-fought election campaign that has played out against a backdrop of scandals regarding the relationship between Budapest and Moscow.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg News said it had obtained a Hungarian government transcript of a call that took place between Orbán and Putin on 17 October, in which Orbán reportedly compared the relationship to that of a “mouse” standing ready to help the Russian “lion” as needed.

“Yesterday our friendship rose to such a high level that I can help in any way,” Orbán reportedly told Putin in the call. “In any matter where I can be of assistance, I am at your service.”

In an attempt to emphasise his point, Orbán was said to have made reference to one of Aesop’s fables in which a mouse who was earlier shown mercy by a lion goes on to free the same lion when it is netted by hunters. The remark drew a laugh from Putin, the transcript suggested.

Orbán, the rightwing populist who has sought to turn Hungary into what he calls an “illiberal democracy”, is the EU’s most Moscow-friendly leader, leading some critics to refer to him as Putin’s Trojan horse.

The most recent revelation heightens the questions that have swirled in recent weeks regarding the lengths that the US and Russia are going to in order to bolster Orbán as he trails in the polls.

Donald Trump has repeatedly endorsed Orbán, describing him as a “fantastic guy” and a “strong and powerful leader”, while his administration has dispatched Vance seemingly in an attempt to turn the tide on Orbán’s lagging campaign. Russian intelligence agencies, along with disinformation networks with links to Russia, are alleged to be working to sway the election.

As Hungarians prepare to vote at the weekend, most polls have suggested Orbán is facing an unprecedented challenge from Péter Magyar, a former top member of Orbán’s Fidesz party, raising the prospect that Orbán could be ousted after 16 years in power.

The prospect has mobilised rightwing leaders around the world, catapulting the election in this central European country of about 9.5 million people on to the global stage.

The election is also being closely followed across the EU. Last week, several leaders expressed outrage over leaked audio that appeared to capture Hungary’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, telling his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, that he would work to amend the EU sanctions list to its liking.

In the call revealed on Tuesday, Putin reportedly praised Hungary’s “independent and flexible” stance on his war against Ukraine. “It is incomprehensible to us that such a balanced, middle-ground position only generates counterarguments,” said the Russian president, according to the transcript.

The call ended with the two leaders inquiring about one another’s health. “I exercise, I also ski. I know you play football,” the Russian president said, according to the transcript. “I try,” Orbán replied, drawing laughter from both men.

Orbán then thanked Putin for the call, saying goodbye to him in Russian, it was reported.

Back in 1995, I published my second book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. In it I argued that trust is among the most precious of social qualities, because it is the basis for human cooperation. In the economy, trust is like a lubricant that facilitates the workings of firms, transactions, and markets. In politics it is the basis for what is called “social capital”—the ability of citizens to cohere in groups and organizations to seek common ends and participate actively in democratic politics.

Societies differ greatly in overall levels of trust. In the 1990s, Harvard’s Robert Putnam wrote a classic study of Italy which contrasted the country’s high-trust north with its distrustful south. Northern Italy was full of civic associations, sports clubs, newspapers, and other organizations that gave texture to public life. The south, by contrast, was characterized by what an earlier social scientist, Edward Banfield, labeled “amoral familism”: a society in which you trust primarily members of your immediate family and have a wary attitude towards outsiders who are, for the most part, out to get you. The only large organizations in the south were the Catholic Church and, of course, the Mafia. The latter was a direct product of distrust: if you were a businessman, you couldn’t count on the state to protect your property rights because of a weak rule of law; if someone cheated you, you hired a mafioso to break their legs.

In Trust, I characterized the United States as a “high-trust” society. This view has a long history. When the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s and traveled across much of the settled part of the country, he noted that America had a high density of civic associations, from bible studies to clubs to mutual aid societies, and that Americans found it relatively easy to work together with strangers in the face of challenges. This, he felt, stood in sharp contrast to his native France, where, he said, you couldn’t find ten Frenchmen who were ready to work together in a common endeavor. In France, there was little of the spontaneous sociability or social capital that he found in the United States. This view of high-trust America was supported, in the mid-20^(th) century, by survey data that showed Americans trusting other Americans to a higher degree than people in France and many other countries.

If I were to re-write Trust today, I would not characterize the United States as a high-trust society. Even as that book was being published in the 1990s, political polarization had started to spread, and Americans began to sort themselves according to their political preferences. That polarization has only increased in the interval between then and now. It has turned into what political scientists label “affective polarization,” in which partisans don’t just disagree on issues, but also come to believe that their opponents are deeply malevolent and dishonest. Social capital still exists between members of the different political tribes, but distrust is rampant across the society as a whole. We don’t accept a common set of facts on issues like vaccine safety or election integrity, and we live by a series of conspiracy theories that inform us that things are not what they seem.

Trust and social capital are built on a foundation of moral virtue. We come to trust people who are honest and reliable, who keep commitments and are willing to offer support even when it isn’t of immediate benefit to themselves. Trust takes time to build through a process of repeated interaction: if we see another person fulfilling their promises and reciprocating favors, we tend to do the same for them, creating a virtuous circle. But a trust relationship that has built up over time can be broken in an instant, if one of the parties betrays that trust and takes advantage of the other player. Just as trust builds on itself, distrust can become self-reinforcing: if we are betrayed, we are tempted to seek revenge against the betrayer.

Trust is also critical in international relations. We come to trust other countries based on their observed behavior, just as we do with individuals. There is no global enforcer of rules or a sovereign to make countries behave. The use of force is constrained only by the expectation that it will be met with a counter-force, in an environment where credibility is the coin of the realm.

That is what makes me extremely worried about the present global situation, and fearful of where our world order is heading.

It is hard to imagine that the current war with Iran and the crisis over the Strait of Hormuz does not represent a fundamental rupture in the North Atlantic security structure. NATO is an alliance built on trust: its deterrent value rests on the belief that NATO members will come to one another’s aid if a member is attacked. This is what happened after 9/11, when a number of alliance members did come to America’s defense in Afghanistan and Iraq. NATO is not an all-purpose commitment to support a treaty partner who has undertaken an offensive war against a third party. Trump is accusing alliance members of betraying the United States by not collaborating with it to re-open the Strait—but no one ever signed up to wage offensive war.

The truth of the matter is that the United States has never been as isolated as it is today. Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, has made some supportive noises in the current crisis, but that was done out of cynical calculation. No sane European leader can think that support for the United States today will be reciprocated by a Trumpist United States down the road. And while American actions have greatly benefited rivals like Russia and China, they can hardly delude themselves that the United States will reliably serve their interests in the future.

Donald Trump has claimed that the United States has never been as respected as it has been under his presidency. Of the very many untrue things he has said in his career, this is among the most absurd. There has never been a time when the United States was more distrusted, by both traditional friends and by rivals, as at the present. A successful dealmaker needs to generate a minimal amount of trust that he will uphold his end of the bargain. But reciprocity is a virtue that Trump has never understood or practiced.

We did it, Joe. We saved South Africa.

(Submission statement in comments)

often when people talk about canadian immigration its from Western and canadian news sources. This is why I find this so important. because this is an indian newspaper looking at it from an indian perspective.

it gives the other side of the picture when we read about how canadian immigration restrictions is being talked about. The higher cost to go to canada the restrictions on student visa all of them is forcing punjabis to change where they are going.

it also talks about the issues suchs as scams and criminality that plague the industry.

all in all canadian immigraton is often talked about from a western perspective so having the perspective on the ground from punjab is something that I feel would contribute to the discourse on the sub.

I need to go to study so please read the article before commenting I am going to post everything in the comments. Dont just look at the title and comment read it please.

Submission statement: Contextualizes the US-Iran war with past examples of empires pursuing the pyrrhic "short war" and failing due to a lack of coherent strategic purpose.