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Do AES countries restrict citizens from leaving?

In the US, I’ve heard that countries like the USSR and North Korea prevent citizens from leaving. Is this propaganda or do AES countries tend to prevent more people leaving than others?

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  • This is not quite the same since it is not about freedom of movement but instead about economic control, but is an interesting comparison: the US charges its citizens income tax even when they are not resident in the US, and it is the only country that does this, IIRC.

    If you leave the US and immigrate elsewhere, the only way to stop paying for the US's militaristic imperialism is to renounce your citizenship.

    • The US impoverishes other countries and entices economic refugees to come to America where they are used as cheap labor. To make matters worse, highly educated immigrants are given special treatment, causing brain drain in the periphery. As a cherry on top, the US under-educates its population and keeps them monolingual so emigrating becomes much harder. And then of course they double tax people and make renouncing citizenship expensive, but I'm pretty sure you have to make over $103,900 for that to apply. If America's parasitic relationship to other countries was ended, not only would it face demographic collapse like all other developed market economies, but it would also become much less relevant in the realm of R&D.

      I'm still for freedom of movement and immigration out of principle, but it should be paired with reparations to undo the unequal development of the world.

    • you have to pay at least a $2530 fee to renounce US citizenship, if you somehow avoid all of the other hidden fees. and Allah help you if you mess up part of the application. cool country 👍

      edit: i conclude it's probably easier to lose citizenship by committing treason or joining a foreign military than doing the state department's arcane (and expensive) rituals

  • Most of the time, I don’t think so. For the DPRK specifically thousands of people have permits to work and live outside of the country, while it’s the South that restricts people going north. The only actual example I can think of is in the GDR where they were dealing with the problem of people getting good free education and housing there but going to West Germany to get a higher paying job.

    • Haven't heard of a DPRKorean who lives outside DPRK, I thought most of them were only allowed to work in Russia or the PRC, since that's what liberal me was fed to regarding info about the DPRK at the time.

      Also, to add with OP's question, are DPRKoreans allowed to keep passports to themselves? Or only the government is allowed to have them (from which the DPRKoreans must return their passport back to the passport office once landing in DPRK)?

      • A lot of them go to South Korea, whereupon they are considered by the government there to be South Korean citizens, and then prohibited from going back to the North. So in a way there are technically no DPRK citizens in south Korea, because south Korea stops recognizing them as DPRK citizens once they cross the border. If you haven't seen loyal citizens of Pyeongyang in Seoul I'd recommend it.

      • Idk all the details, but yeah, the work permits are mostly for China/Russia, but that’s probably because most countries sanction the DPRK more, and don’t want them there. I know there are people who’ve gone to China and then to somewhere like South Korea.

  • Well, in the GDR, 20% of the population had immigrated to the west before the government started more strictly regulating emigration. Restricting who could leave was kind of a necessity at that point.

    • The GDR started allowing more travel to the west in the 1970s. You could visit if you were aged over 50 or had relatives in the west, and other people could also visit but they had to wait much longer and get an approval from the Stasi (most requests were approved). By 1988, millions of people legally visited West Germany each year and over 99.9% returned to the GDR.

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