(via Chrenkoff & Raj) As I mentioned in an earlier post tracking progress in Afghanistan, perhaps the single most profound means most folks in the world have to "vote" is with their feet.   It's a variation of the classic "stated vs. revealed preferences" problem and immigration flows are about as "revealed" as you can get.  It's one thing when people flippantly answer some Gallup poll or chant in front of a BBC camera at little or no cost to themselves.  It's quite another when they pack up their belongings and cast their lot to the winds of fate in a new, strange country with their own lives, families, and pocketbooks on the line.   It's hard to fathom a truer, more political BS-free metric that provides the contextual evidence for how things compare with the alternatives people face.

So, 'twas interesting to come across this article discussing the latest "refugee problem" in Iraq -

Baghdad, Iraq Press, May 7, 2004 – “Do you speak Persian?”  That is the question you will need to answer if you apply for a job in the mushrooming private sector in most cities in southern Iraq and parts of Baghdad.

Since the downfall of Saddam Hussein’s regime about a year ago, hundreds of thousands of Iranians are believed to have crossed the border into Iraq.

... The Iranians are buying property and setting up new businesses in the south.  Many of those who have moved to the country in the past year are determined to stay.

... Paul Bremer, the top US civil administrator in the country, two months ago visited one of the major border posts with Iran to see what can be done to at least regulate the exodus of Iranians into Iraq.

The visit came after a statement by the interim Interior Ministry warned that at least 10,000 Iranians cross into Iraq everyday only through the three main crossing border posts with Iran.

... It is estimated that at least some four million Iranians have crossed into the country during the past year and most of them have stayed behind.

Now the downstream implications are complex and I'm far from knowledgeable enough to tease apart all the outcomes. For ex., will these Iranians bring a belief in theocracy to Iraq?   Or are these the Iranians who were most disabused of theocracy?  Perhaps a few of them are the "foreign fighters" who've been stirring up the southern regions?  Or some mix of the three.  It's well understood, for ex, that simply having a large undocumented, not-legally-visible population within your borders is a bad thing in and of itself as folks like Hernando Soto have noted.  I simply don't know how this all works in balance.

Nevertheless, regardless of how this illegal-alien-problem-in-the-making ultimately pans out, there's a silver lining in the unambiguous signal that something's going right in a most personal way & this story needs more probing press coverage.   For some chunk of these up to 4M individuals - the ones setting up businesses and buying property - an Infidel-occupied Iraq, replete with Abu Ghraib, Najaf, Fallujah, wedding air strikes, and/or whatever other disaster Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International digs up was still a preferable choice to whatever they were facing back home - otherwise the human flows would be reversed.

What made 'em walk?   My hunch is that for most, the driver was the comparative economic liberalization in Iraq rather than the political "freedom"  (it's highly likely that these folks - like our own Mexican illegals - will NOT be very politically participative in a direct sense).  If that's the case, then perhaps - a la Fareed Zakaria - reform efforts in the Mid East are better served by measures like strengthening Iraq's currency, solidifying it's banking infra, rooting out corruption, etc. and hoping that these institutions spill over the border rather than hastily pushing for national elections and expecting that to spark real regional reform.  But our reporters aren't arming us with this data much less prepared to ask these questions themselves.

Still, somehow these Persians learned about conditions on the other side of the border despite CNN, CBS, BBC and Al Jazeera maintaining varying levels of willful ignorance (ask anyone fed a steady diet of BBC which side of the border they would have expected to see the refugee crisis).  Call it the triumph of P2P news and the "pursuit of happiness" through property perhaps.  Whatever, the case, this is far more significant data for making decisions about our Mid East policy than the latest "dead ender" who shoots a $100 RPG into a flea market.