[merpnderp]

Where are there larger disparities inside of a country than from a large emigrating country? The reason people from Mississippi don't all pack up and move to California is they are per capita richer than the UK, even though in the US that state is considered the poorest.

[ux-app]

Off the top of my head I don't know of any one country that has a huge disparity (though I'm sure examples exist), but the EU is a good case study.

Legal Economic migration within the EU is definitely an issue, however it hasn't resulted in "destabilizing and draining the cities of resources".

E.g. Estonia's GDP is 99.07% smaller than the UK's[1], and Estonia is not empty. Edit - as pointed out below a per-capita comparison makes much more sense... oops

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=estonia+gdp+vs+uk+

Edit: I know that GDP is not a measure of standard of living, but they are correlated and it servers as a reasonable proxy

[jsnell]

Raw GDP is an absurd proxy for standard of living, you're comparing a country of 70 million to a country of 1.5 million. At the very least you'd need it to be per capita. Maybe PPP adjusted.

[ux-app]

Thanks for pointing this out and you're absolutely right. The per capita comparison is much better, and shows Estonia's economy at 54% smaller [1] (Bulgaria makes for an even starker contrast at 82% smaller per capita [3])

Edit - As a final edit, the largest disparity across standard of living in the EU is between Luxembourg and Bulgaria, and comparing their per-capita GDP shows that Bulgaria's economy is 93.2% smaller [4]

This is still a considerable difference between the two countries and yet not everyone has fled from Estonia/Bulgaria.

The point though is that there is a very big spread in the standard of living [2] across the EU and yet mass migration is not occurring.

[1] - http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=estonia+per+capita+gdp+...

[2] - http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/dec/11/uk-living-stand...

[3] - http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=bulgaria+per+capita+gdp...

[4] - http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=bulgaria+per+capita+gdp...