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Honestly in today's world, as somebody who bailed from a top-tier Western democracy to a 'mid tier' economy, this is a large part of why I find a lot of desperate migration pushes to be silly. If you're capable of getting into the upper-middle class of like 80% of the world's countries you're probably gonna be broadly fine. Urban development has largely plateaued for a decade or two now, especially in the West where the sheer expense of construction and associated red tape means that the nicer parts of the mid-tier countries are on par/better since they can actually develop things (and keep the homeless out). I'm in Malaysia now after leaving Australia, and from what I can see a lot of white collar quality of life outcomes are essentially equal between here and Australia. You might be earning 40% the wages you would in Australia, staying in Malaysia, but large portions of your expenditures (especially housing) are about 30% the price they would be in Australia.
The Malaysian Chinese demographic have historically been prone to emigration since they're filtered hard from University placements inside the country and therefore go overseas to pursue higher education. 20 years ago they were a lot more prone to just staying in the UK/Australia/wherever else they went, but now the perceived gap in quality of life has shrunk immensely. Same for Chinese. And like I have no doubt that the Somalias of the world still exist where every day is suffering and a battle for survival, but also there's a correlation between immigrants from those places and being unlikely to actually contribute to their destination country.
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