If there's already been discussion on this at length that someone knows of, feel free to link me.
I've been thinking this over because it's one of those recurring talking points that comes up. I may have even talked about it here before in passing, but I don't remember for sure.
But I wanted to talk about the core of how BS it is and the main way I see it get used. Which is that of someone saying "my [relative] lived in [socialist state] and fled it", or they will leave out the first part and just say "people lived in [socialist state] and fled it." And then the implication or outright stated, "Why aren't you taking this as proof that communism bad? Clearly communism bad!"
The primary way I've seen people counter this is pointing out that those who were fleeing were sometimes, well... members of the former exploiting class. Which is true.
But I'm not sure the talking point is even worth entertaining to that degree. Because like:
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As far as I've seen, nobody provides actual hard numbers on people "fleeing communism" relative to other situations where people flee a conflict or just leave a country to go to another one in general. In fact, it's often an anecdotal claim about a single person: "My relative."
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Is there even such a thing as a major conflict/upheaval in a country at scale where it was possible for people to flee and nobody fled? Like big change can be scary and it's always going to be somewhat disruptive of status quo, even if it's an overall benefit going forward. Not to mention major changing of hands of power usually involves some violence.
So this leads me to: what is supposed to be different about communism that makes people "fleeing it" special? I've yet to see any explanation on that and so it makes me think that may be a point to push back on with people. That rather than even talking about the nature of why, first ask how it is supposed to be a special kind of "fleeing".
And also, when it's purely anecdotal, asking why they are supposed to be taken seriously over the opinions of the millions (or more) of people who make up X socialist state. In that regard, it sounds a lot like the "one of my closest friends is [racial minority] trope" in that they are sort of implying the people are monolithic and one or a few can speak for all of them.
Thoughts?
Just about all people who migrate from socialist countries to capitalist one do so for economic reasons not ideological ones, this is self evident in that its very rare for one to migrate to a capitalist global south country.
All (successful) revolution so far have happened in global south/backwards/periphery countries so in many cases while socialism raised living standard of all working people, its still better to live in the imperial core for some people, so reality is that in cases like Cuba and Venezuela they arent fleeing communism they are fleeing the legacy of colonialism or they are fleeing the sanctions imposed on socialist countries (which is an attempt to re establish a colonial relation so kinda the same). Or in the case of the no longer existing socialist countries in eastern Europe its a little different people were fleeing lesser development rather than colonialism. And in both cases they were participating in brain drain which is also a pretty big driver.
I've seen the same with some eastern euro people who immigrated to the US. They have stories of bread lines and things being really tough economically, but these were all stories from the 90s, after the USSR was dissolved. They blame it on socialism, but they were too young at the time to have experienced life as an adult before and after the dissolution.