it’s frightening to consider how much harder it’s become to escape regimes that actively want to kill you since WWII, which really seems like the exact wrong lesson the world should have learned
It is dispiriting, but not a surprising consequence of the pressure of economic migration being so strong combined with the physical cost and difficulty coming down so much.
Yeah. It’s only gotten worse since then. Talking with friends who legitimately moved to Canada and seeing how hard that was was eye opening.
Of course that also assumes that there’s somewhere better to live.
B. Traven's novel The Death Ship always sticks in my head for being about the moment of transition. A little earlier than what you're talking about, but it's about sailors on a merchant ship who don't have papers and so can't be anywhere.