Thanks for your comments and questions, which I imagine you've made in good faith—even as I'm about to be highly critical of them! A few thoughts:
1. It's interesting, and maybe a little telling, that your example of a major benefit to Puerto Rico is Puerto Ricans being able to leave our homeland and move to the U.S. If the United States' political condition required that you move to London to lead a good life and achieve prosperity, I imagine you might think there's something deeply wrong with that. At the very least, you might say it's good that individual people can do that, but it's awful for the nation that they leave and gets slowly emptied out. Indeed, that's what's happened to Puerto Rico over the decades.
2. I am not sure how much you know about Puerto Rico's economy or how much you've read about Puerto Rico's economic prospects under various status options. I hope a lot! But I'll guess a little; which has nothing to do with you and everything to do with the fact that most people know and have read almost nothing about Puerto Rico. In my experience, absent any concrete knowledge, people's ideas about the economic consequences of Puerto Rican independence are based on oversimplistic assumptions (U.S. = big and rich; PR = small and poor) that don't take into account incredibly complicated socioeconomic dynamics. But economists and experts (including the GAO) who have published studies and reports on this topic basically agree that there are challenges and opportunities with either statehood or independence. They do not predict some massive economic calamity for a sovereign Puerto Rico.
3. But let's assume you're right and independence would hugely hurt Puerto Rico economically. The question is why. I suppose one option could be that any small island of 3 million Latinos is naturally destined to struggle without some rich country propping up its economy. I don't think that's true; there are examples of much smaller nations around the world achieving prosperity. And even if it were true, we might want to act as if it weren't, or we'd end up in a situation where we should just assign each small country a colonial overlord or just combine smaller nations into big empires. I certainly don't like either of those ideas.
The other option is that, for the past 125 years, Puerto Rico has been unable to achieve the economic sustainability that would allow it to be free and prosperous. Perhaps; I don't think so, but perhaps. But the United States has been in charge of Puerto Rico all that time! That doesn't mean they've directly made every decision or are directly responsible for every problem. (Though they certainly did and were for the first few decades.) But everything Puerto Rico has done or not done has happened in the context of economic and political conditions that the United States imposed, allowed, or prohibited. That's why I've written elsewhere that we cannot treat the economic precarity created or exacerbated by colonialism as the driving argument for whether Puerto Rico can escape colonialism. To do that would be as if I went to your house when you were a child, tied your hands behind your back for decades, and then judged your ability to lead an independent life based on how much you've been able to accomplish with your feet.
OK, I guess that was more than a few thoughts! I hope you've found them thought-provoking and helpful.
