It’s been almost 50 years since President JFK told an enthusiastic German audience that the US had “..never had to put up a wall to keep our people in.”
There are walls and there are walls. The sentiment, at any rate, indeed seems like a very distant memory now.
The impulse to punish people for leaving the country strikes me as a primitive one, even if it’s directed only at a wealthy few. Because it doesn’t remain so limited. These things take on a life of their own.
Lawyers on Strike 