Is It Racist to Call North Korea a Shithole Country. . .

. . . if you don't also call South Korea a shithole country?

North and South Korea best illustrate that it is the nature of the country, and not the race of the people that determine its status as a shithole.

North and South Korea share the same racial makeup, in fact, having many families split by the current division line. There is simply no significant racial difference.

And yet, North Korea is clearly a shithole. It's a poor country, it's people are starving and parasite ridden, and largely ignorant. Aside from the possibility of being spies for the Nork government, North Koreans are poor candidates for immigration in any merit based system. And we can't take them all based on humanitarian grounds. Certainly, some North Koreans who escape have a strong motivation and the abilities to "make it" in our country, but as for the masses, I doubt it.

Across the DMZ, South Korea is relatively wealthy, healthy and industrious, i.e, not a shithole. Its citizens would make good candidates for immigration based on merit. The only question is whether its citizens would want to leave their own country.

What has determined the status of a country as shithole is its political leadership. North Korea followed its Maoist Chinese allies, and even failed to make the turn towards the more free market communism that Chinese have recently adopted, and turned into a pariah state, funding itself with crime and blackmail, and run by a pseudo-royal family.  South Korea followed the democratic model of it's ally, the US, and has prospered.

We can see a similar dynamic playing out in Venezuela and Columbia today. Is it racist to call Venezuela a shithole, if you don't also call Columbia a shithole?

We should prefer our immigrants to be comfortable with our democratic freedoms and political culture, rather than longing for an authoritarian state that ostensibly provides more support for its citizen, at least until the bottom falls out, as it inevitably does.

As Instapundit notes, even Hollywood A listers are not volunteering to live in shithole countries:

 EDDIE SCARRY: “Among the celebrities who said they would move if Trump won the election were: Chelsea Handler to Spain; Lena Dunham to Vancouver; Barbara Streisand to Australia or Canada; and Snoop Dogg to Canada. Notice that none of them identified their final destinations as the slums of El Salvador.”

let alone Haiti, Venezuela, Somalia and North Korea.

Linked by Evi L. Bloggerlady in "Trump already has a "wall" that Democrats fear..." and "What A Shithole!"