I find the title of this topic to be quite appropriate and it's what got me to read it and the linked article.
I first heard the term when I started junior high school in 1960 in reference to people in East Germany "voting with their feet" through Berlin.
Before the
Berlin Wall went up in August of 1961 a lot of West Berlin workers lived in East Berlin and commuted. It became quite common for those that had loose or no family ties in the east to dress in as many layers of clothes as they could, commute to work and never return to East Berlin. This, of course, was called "voting with your feet".
I watched the Berlin Wall being built on tv.
It was in those years that there were quite a few highjackings of US airliners to Havana by communist sympathizers and the start of air travel security. The interesting fact was many more people were heading into the US and/or the west than were trying to go to Communist countries.
Later, in the late 1980's I was working for a US company that sent me to West Germany to do a service call at a Continental Tire plant in Hanover. One of the engineers spent most of a Saturday guiding me around the local countryside and at one point we stopped at a village that had been bisected by the "Iron Curtain" between East and West Germany. I happened to take a path into the woods near the road and found a small stream paralleling the border. In the middle of the stream was a sign in both German and English (maybe other languages, I don't recall). The gist of the sign was, you cross this line you WILL die, no ifs, no ands, no buts, YOU WILL DIE period.
Beyond that was about a 300 yard wide open free fire strip of grassland with tall concrete guard towers visible along the east edge. My guide told me each tower had a machine gun crew with orders to shoot anyone entering that free fire zone from either direction.
In 1989, I was again doing a service call for the same company but in Pirot, Yugoslavia (in the area now called Serbia) when I was told by the engineer I was working with that the Wall was being torn down. I thought she was joking but at 2 AM the next morning I woke to an English language news program on my hotel TV showing the Berliners tearing it down.
On a more personal note, my second (and last) wife's parents voted with their feet after WWII. He was from Latvia and she was from Estonia and they met in a displaced persons camp in West Germany. They immigrated to the US around 1950.
