Authoritarian regimes prevent people from leaving. The Berlin Wall, Soviet Union, and North Korea all used force to keep citizens in. The speaker argues the US is doing the same through abortion bans, border checkpoints, and passport rules that block intersex people, and urges healthcare workers to move to Canada.
Chapters
Imagine if the US government stopped letting redheads travel out of the country. In a way, they have. One of the most clear signs that a government has gone off its rails is when it stops letting its own people leave. A lot of people don't know this, but the Berlin Wall was built to keep people in, not out. Government officials said they were losing too many workers, too many engineers, too many people who saw the other side and wanted it. So they put up barbed wire. When they found people trying to leave, they shot them in the back. The Soviets, same thing. From the 1920s, they locked down their borders so tight, the country might as well have been a prison. North Korea? It's been illegal to leave since 1948. Yes, diplomats and athletes occasionally get special permission, but they have to leave named relatives behind so the regime knows they're coming back. Cuba? After the revolution, Castro's government made it illegal to leave the country without permission. Permission you would never get if you were, like, a doctor or a scientist, because your skills belonged to the revolution. Not to you. China, 1949, started requiring Communist Party approval to travel. That was rarely granted. Czechoslovakia built electric fences, cleared border villages. Guards had standing order to shoot. With the benefit of hindsight, history now realizes it was also a sign of weakness. The desperation of authoritarian governments so brittle, so hollow, that they couldn't bear to let people vote with their feet. And now the US is doing the same. States criminalizing reproductive healthcare, floating travel bans to stop women from crossing state lines. Border Patrol agents set up meters from the Canadian border to stop people from leaving the US, or at the very least intimidate them enough to make them think twice about it. And today, the US Supreme Court effectively blocking people from leaving who can't use an M or F gender marker on their passport. This traps intersex Americans who aren't either. It's not a gender identity, it's their natural biology. Roughly 1-2% of people are born intersex. It's about the same number who are born redheads. Stopping your citizens from leaving is the desperate act of a government that believes it cannot afford dissent. When a government starts locking the fire exits, it's admitting that it's afraid of what happens when people walk away. And once that fear sets in, history has proven it is a short road to justifying anything. Now, the only difference is how fast we know to this, and how long we wait before calling it what it is. If you are an American healthcare worker and you want a place where your kids can be safe and your work matters, check out Canada. You're not starting from zero here. You already have neighbors and colleagues and friends waiting to open the door. We'll help you land. We'll help you settle. You'll be home sooner than you think.
