North Korea doesn’t want defectors from South Korea or the U.S. anymore.

There was a time when North Korea would have welcomed a defector from the United States and, long after any intelligence value had been squeezed out of him, put him in propaganda films for a generation. Today, if you try to defect to North Korea, they’ll sentence you to hard labor until Jimmy Carter comes to make them a different kind of propaganda film.

More surprising, however, is that North Korea doesn’t want South Korean defectors, either. There was a time when such a defector would have been heralded as proof of North Korea’s superior ideology, legitimacy, and standard of living. When North Korea rejects defectors from the South, it suggests to me that its security forces know that no one believes those things anymore, except for a few crazies who aren’t worth feeding and caring for.