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?
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.
The problem isn’t leaving, the problem is finding a country to accept you. You can have a passport but if you don’t have the visa, they’ll turn you away at the airport.
Let’s not also think that back in the day of the USSR it was easy to travel around the world. Schengen and the popularisation of air travel are relatively recent developments.
The big measure I can think of was in the GDR, but even then the “Berlin wall” was maligned. Imperialists created a problem and then mocked the only solution. They actually created two problems; the first one was dividing Berlin in two. https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Anti-Fascist_Protection_Rampart
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.
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
I have not lived in the US for most of my adult life, and have been in the process of renouncing for a while now, as I need to to get my new citizenship.
I was interrupted by covid, because they just decided to not let anyone renounce during that time period, so I have started my application process over. You’re lucky if you only get the couple thousand charge, because the chances are very high that they will find some tax that you didn’t pay you suddenly owe now.
Honestly, paying income tax to the US for the rest of my life is probably the easier route. At least most people get it all returned.
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.