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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread June 2010, Part 3 - Less Wrong
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I don't think that's a good metric. Societies that aren't open to mass immigration can have negligible numbers of immigrants regardless of the quality of life their members enjoy. Japan is the prime example.
Moreover, in the very worst places, emigration can be negligible because people can be too poor to pay for the ticket to move anywhere, or prohibited to leave.
A fair point, though I think societies like that are pretty rare. Any other notable examples?
Off the top of my head, I know that Finland had negligible levels of immigration until a few years ago. Several Eastern European post-Communist countries are pretty decent places to live these days (I have in mind primarily the Czech Republic), but still have no mass immigration. As far as I know, the same holds for South Korea.
Regarding emigration, the prime example were the communist countries, which strictly prohibited emigration for the most part (though, rather than looking at the numbers of emigrants, we could look at the efforts and risks many people were ready to undertake to escape, which often included dodging snipers and crawling through minefields).