USSR with Open Borders?

Effects of USSR with Open Borders?

  • Maximally Positive

    Votes: 11 12.2%
  • Minimally Positive

    Votes: 12 13.3%
  • No Effect

    Votes: 2 2.2%
  • Minimally Negative

    Votes: 3 3.3%
  • Maximally Negative

    Votes: 62 68.9%

  • Total voters
    90
5. Who would really like to move into the USSR ? In OTL hardly anybody. Wolfgang Leonard describes seeing a black man in 1942 somewhere i Sibiria and knowing exactly who that was, because he was the onle black soviet citizen.

OTL some people did move to the USSR - mostly from poorer Communist-aligned states. Vietnam was a relatively major immigrant source.

This wasn't much though. The Soviet Union did its best to discourage people coming in as well as leaving. (The red tape facing workers moving from other Soviet Block countries is something to see - labour moving from, say, Vietnam to the USSR or Poland was treated like any other trade good, and thus subjected to the USSR's whole dysfunctional way of trading.)

fasquardon
 
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This is not at all likely. Admittedly East Germany is an extreme example, of a country lacking a solid national existence populated almost entirely by people who would be eligible for citizenship in a prosperous Western country, but almost every territory and population in the Soviet bloc had at least some history of emigration. In some countries this tradition was stronger than in others--Poland had a history of large-scale emigration lacking in the Czech lands--but it existed everywhere. Even the wealthiest lands in the Soviet bloc were often poorer than their neighbours in western Europe, even before Communism. Later, this gap yawned.

This emigration would be huge. In Croatia from the 1960s on, for instance, almost a half-million people emigrated as gastarbeitar to various points in central Europe, out of a republican population of four million. Croatia's diaspora was a product of Yugoslavia's liberalization and opening to the west, as a way to relieve domestic unemployment and to acquire money that could be sent back home to spur domestic consumption. In the context of the 1960s, where roaring economic growth across most of western Europe created labour shortages that could be filled only by migrant labour, if Soviet bloc countries adopted Yugoslav-style policies I can imagine huge numbers of migrants being accepted. A Poland that had traditionally been a major source of migrants for Germany and France, even during the Cold War OTL, might resume this role. Who knows?

For relatively Yugoslavia-style permeable borders to be possible in the Soviet bloc, you will need to radically alter world history. At the very least, these countries and this bloc will need to be at least as friendly with western Europe as Yugoslavia. This means that the Cold War will not occur, or at the very least it will be hugely changed.
 
Maximally horrible. The economies of the Eastern Bloc were behind economically, and the people of the Eastern Bloc disliked their governments (which only held power because of the Soviets). There would be mass migration out of the Eastern Bloc.

The Joke was "If the borders open what will you do?"

"Climb a tree"

"Why?"

"So I am not crushed in the rush"
 
This wasn't much though. The Soviet Union did its best to discourage people coming in as well as leaving. (The red tape facing workers moving from other Soviet Block countries is something to see - labour moving from, say, Vietnam to the USSR or Poland was treated like any other trade good, and thus subjected to the USSR's whole dysfunctional way of trading.)

fasquardon

Actually one reason why Czechs have so Large Vietnamese diaspora is that, North Vietnam lacked resources to pay for arms.
So they sent worker as compensation pretty similar to slave trade. "But only Evilz Kapitalist could do that right?"





The Joke was "If the borders open what will you do?"

"Climb a tree"

"Why?"

"So I am not crushed in the rush"

"How do you plan to save energy comrad"?
Everyone leaves and last one shuts dawn the lights"
 
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