Great username/post combo?
And over a century later still no enfranchisement. Same can be said for Puerto Rico – 29th in population, but still not a state and still without enfranchisement. Enfranchisement is something Greenlanders would lose if they were to be sold to the USA.
Look at how Puerto Rico was treated following the hurricane, and note that Trump pitched financial support to Greenland by Denmark as being a bad thing.
The incarceration rate of the USA is more than double that of Greenland.
Being sold to a shithole led by a racist is not in the best interests of Greenlanders, which is why it is absurd for Trump to have expected that they would be willing to be sold.
I noticed that North Carolina currently has a $900M budget surplus. Rather than waste it on increasing teachers’ salaries or fixing all the state-maintained bridges that are falling apart, I think NC should be thinking more long-term.
First, find 40K NC welfare recipients and pay them $22,500 to emigrate to Greenland. Make sure they are all adults and of voting age. Support them until they are given the right to vote there. (My SWAG is that we could achieve 51% by tossing in about 40K voters.)
Second, organize a plebiscite where Greenland votes on becoming NC’s Outer Outer Banks. I personally think that eastern NC barbecue, banana pudding, and old-fashioned biscuits will do the trick. Also, NC cars do not have to have front license plates.
Results: NC residents will have a cool place to go during the summer and autumn months to escape the hurricanes (not the hockey team) without having to obtain a passport. Win-win.
- But again minus emotional rant mode (see point 2
) Greenland’s representation in the Danish parliament, proportion to its population relative to metropolitan Denmark, is negligible and moreover meaningless to the extent Greenlanders see themselves as something other than Danes.
The reason people in Puerto Rico care about that (to the extent they do) is if they see themselves as Americans. Plus there’s a political motive by Democrats to have more states in the Senate, particularly, which would be expected to reliably elect Democrats (that sentiment IME tends to be more intense than the one in Puerto Rico itself).
But the other concept of a territory, which applies to Greenland’s current status wrt Denmark, as well as some other far flung existing US territories closer to Greenland on the population scale than Puerto Rico, is that the people there don’t necessarily view themselves as purely Danes/Americans but something separate, but it’s just more practical that their self determination be achieved by autonomy under a viably (population) sized country rather than as an independent country. There are nominally at least wholly independent countries with smaller populations than Greenland but that doesn’t absolutely settle the issue for people there.
Although again I don’t see the three practical issues as lining up particularly in favor of Greenland wanting to be a US territory
-autonomy would not be greater than currently
-Denmark may be as willing to subsidize Greenland for as much as long as the US would, though that is a drag on Denmark, Trump isn’t making that up
-Denmark is a far weaker protector than the US, but it is an ally of the US, and it’s open to debate how much threat ‘great power arctic rivalry’ is really ever going to threaten Greenland (although that is a non-zero issue IMO in Greenlanders deciding whether they want to be a full fledged independent country)
Plus, to some degree a fair proportion of Greenlanders might see themselves as a kind of Danes, or value that connection anyway for other than strictly practical reasons, vs. in no way viewing themselves as American.