Aside from what others have said, the US is a slave colony. Slaves are not allowed to leave. Having the largest prison population in the world requires a lot of walls! Kennedy said that quote during Jim Crow.

I think the best answer is the honest one: that it represents a contradiction in a world with mixed Socialist and Capitalist systems. It's not an easy to surmount problem and is a valid one, though maybe not in the way Liberals believe.

By and large, the people "fleeing" Socialist states for the West were not peasants and workers. They were Professionals. If you were a common laborer, you were treated well in, say, East Germany and had little reason to leave. The people who were leaving were those just a bit higher up the scale.

"Professional" is a broad category in this case that could represent any "skilled laborer" or small business owners. Lawyers and doctors, grocers, cobblers, accountants, plumbers, whatever.

These are people who could live a good life in East Germany but could live a better life in the West. You can't really blame them for this - they're just furthering their material interests, which is what Marxism tells us they must do.

You don't get the opposite - the poor fleeing to Socialist states - at least partially because Socialist states were not open to that sort of immigration. Socialist nations already oftentimes struggled to maintain full employment and rarely needed excess labor.

I live in a 24/7 hellscape of propaganda, manipulation, and surveillance. A wall would be quaint.

i guess the slaves on the plantations stayed of their own volition

"Communism isn't perfect, but we have never had to shoot our leader in the head for not being evil enough"

The wall was built by the Soviets because of the anticommunist groups funded and organised in West Germany. They would easily infiltrate into East Germany and pull off sabotage, intelligence and terrorist activities because of the free flow across the border.

Source

Archive of source

The ProleWiki article actually could be fleshed out more with the above sources. I don't know how to do wiki editing though.

Wait, i thought that the Berlin wall encircled West Berlin, which was part of West Germany?

If, so, when looking at a map...

While the availability of consumer goods is seen as a giant success story by most historians of the present, the perception at the time was a different one: prices were so high that average people could not afford to shop, especially since prices were free-ranging but wages still fixed by law. Therefore, in the summer of 1948 a giant wave of strikes and demonstrations swept over West Germany, leading to an incident in Stuttgart where strikers were met by US tanks ("Stuttgarter Vorfälle"). Only after the wage-freeze was abandoned, Deutschmark and free-ranging prices were accepted by the population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Mark#Currency_reform_of_June_1948

The Western powers unilateral currency reform is what caused the partition of Germany beyond the existing 4 Allied Zones. This is often glossed over in any pro-NATO historical analysis. This is essentially the first act of the Cold War from the Western powers. The UK zone started it, and was quickly joined by the other 2 Western Zones (US, France).

South Korea totally doesn't shoot civilians trying to cross to the north

The US charges income tax on US citizens who live and work outside of the United States, resulting in "double tax", you pay taxes to the US and the country you reside in. In 1966, 3 years after JFK's assassination, the US passed an "expatriation tax" law which allows the IRS to charge taxes on former US citizens for up to 10 years after they renounce citizenship.

You get charged extra income taxes for living outside of the US and you might be charged extra taxes for renouncing your citizenship. This may not be a literal wall, but it is a metaphoric wall which prevents people from leaving.

Imagine if half of Toronto was controlled by the USSR during the cold war, with a large military base and a constant stream of planes coming in and out. Of course the US would build a wall around the soviet sector

Try crossing the border from Occupied Korea into Real Korea as a US citizen and see how the American troops stationed there respond.

You mean the antifascist defense wall?

on top of everything else on this thread, it's a lot cheaper to just declare them a criminal and put out an international arrest warrant

you don't need walls when you control everything inside and outside the border

Yeah you and your Democratic friends just put barriers of oppression around the global south. How many african/asian/south american countries self determination efforts did you Democratic countries support shutting down? Or lives snuffed? I'll need to use a black book criteria because those numbers would be diabolical

The formation of bourgeois nation states is literally a story of liberal democrats et al. building walls to keep people in. But I'm sorry, liberals just do not have long-term memory or the ability to look beyond the surface level (even just that can confuse them!).

Just point at the global border regime which exists purely to keep poor people in the exploited global south and unable to enjoy the wealth plundered from them, which is hoarded in the global north. It's far larger and more violent than the Berlin wall ever was; it spans the entire planet.

The capitalists built a wall around the world to keep their enslaved masses trapped in servitude

What do you need a wall for when you have bad credit scores and drug possession charges?

I don't know if anything Kennedy said can be used to defend our system, which ultimately killed him because the gangsters running it felt their bottom line being threatened. But yeah even conceding the premise to him, it's not impressive that the West amassed such a fortune over centuries of colonizing the planet that they could terrorize people with arms escalation, manage to pay their skilled workers for a few decades, and bribe ones from the rest of the world to migrate.

Don't need a wall when you have total branwashing