What makes for a shithole?

Here’s an awkward truth. It’s easier to attract talented people from shithole countries than from Norway.

What kind of Norwegian, after all, wants to emigrate? Norway is rated by the United Nations as the happiest country on earth, a place where anyone with a bit of energy can succeed. The same is not true, of, say, Niger. Emigration is the best option for a Nigerien with ability, courage, and grit.

America, we might say, was built on the failure of shitholes. People came from all manner of poor and oppressive states, straightening their backs when they arrived. Your ancestors must have had some reason to make the journey. Where were they from?

Tsarist Russia was a shithole, even for most of its gentile subjects, let alone for its Jews. So was Sicily in the decades following Italian unification. It might be an understatement to use that word for Ireland during the potato famine. In each case, the people who got out — generally shrewder and more enterprising people — brought their ambitious genes to the U.S.

What made America different? Not any magical property in its water. Rather, a system of government that elevated the rules above the rulers and the individual above the collective. Suppose that, in 1803, Thomas Jefferson had decided to buy Haiti rather than Louisiana from Napoleon. Which, do you reckon, would be the shithole now?