Why Are So Many Young Puerto Ricans Leaving Home?

Before you start getting too optimistic after reading last week’s New York Times piece on the tourism scene in Puerto Rico, VICE News gives us our weekly dosage of pessimism. In a rather depressing piece that repeats the problems we’ve all read about before, they highlight the reasons for the exodus of young Puerto Ricans from the territory:

Everywhere you go in Puerto Rico, people want to leave. “Why would I stay?” Jannette Sanchez, a 30-year-old law student at San Juan’s Interamerican University, asked VICE News during a recent trip to take stock of the increasingly dismal life in the United States’ most populous overseas territory. Sanchez, whose father once had a high-paying job at the now nearly insolvent government electrical company, ticked off the times she had been a victim of violence. With friends in Dallas — along with half a dozen other American cities — Sanchez plans to move to Texas immediately after graduating. “There are people here with master’s degrees and PhDs who work at Walmart part-time,” she said. “It’s a joke.”

If only it were a joke…