'The West' is, in fact, the world's biggest gated community

If &quot;The West&quot; is a gated community, how is it that so many countries are managing to join &quot;The West&quot;? Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore used not to be &quot;Western&quot; countries. Central and Eastern Europe, same thing.<p>I&#x27;ve never seen a gated community that was this easy to join. Just reform your country&#x27;s institutions, decide to start caring about economic freedom and other basic liberties, and you&#x27;re basically there.

Sure has a lot of immigration from outside the West for a gated community [1]. On the other hand, non-Western countries have near-zero Western immigration, or even inter-continental migration among themselves. So much so that, when viewed with a granularity on the scale of an India, China, or North-&#x2F;Sub-Saharan Africa, they&#x27;re nearly perfectly homogeneous, in <i>stark</i> contrast to the &quot;closed, gated&quot; West.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-avenue&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;14&#x2F;the-us-will-become-minority-white-in-2045-census-projects&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-avenue&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;14&#x2F;the-us-...</a>

If I&#x27;m not mistaken Singapore and Bermuda have higher average incomes than the US and Europe. On the other hand the people of Costa Rica, Uruguay and Chile for example are mostly pretty happy with their circumstances as are other middle income countries that are not kleptocracies. China too is coming up fast in terms of income if not democracy. Hard to argue that it&#x27;s not a gated community too even if the gate is bi-directional in this case. Overall this looks like a cherry picking exercise.

I was sad they seem to be talking about a literal wall.<p>Not sure it has meaning or is even useful to know other than for sci-fi.<p>Even if you could politically take down [B. The Australian Defense Force (ADF)], which you can&#x27;t, approximately no one came through anyway... and once in they are now behind the wall.<p>Compared with, The West seems to have a wall of language and culture that&#x27;s hard to break. Don&#x27;t underestimate the value of fully understanding Game of Thrones.<p>This you can change.