werk the way you can tell we have a better standard of living that exists in other places is by the fact that people are risking their lives to move from where they are to here.
This is a naive reading, and also, in my view, reflects rather paternalistic imperialist perspectives that, even to this day, fuel the "utter poverty" narrative about the developing world, which is rather insulting to the people of those regions. The middle classes in many developing countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa have a better standard of living than many working class Brits.
Particularly in the Middle East, outside areas now affected by ISIS, the lives of the middle classes are not unpleasant whatsoever; indeed, in some ME countries, their middle class standard of living is significantly better than our middle class standard of living -- and I am not including the Gulf in that.
Again, I worked for an African project a number of years ago that tried to correct misconceptions about Africa by going into schools and giving talks and presentations about what Africa really looked like, because, in Britain, we have been consistently exposed to a certain narrative about the continent ... that everyone is starving, that there are no amenities, no economies, everywhere is desert, no one has a car and many of the countries are perpetually at war. And it is just not true.
I think the danger here is confusing migration for "a better life" with migration for "an easier life". There are a lot of false perceptions about Britain that fuel migrant flows, particularly from Africa. There was a book written by a female journalist in the early 00s I cannot remember the title, but it had a yellow cover, and she was a broadsheet journalist where she went to Lampedusa to interview African migrants that had landed on the island. She found that almost all of them believed that, in Britain, the authorities gave out new cars free. They had been told that if they came to Britain, they would be given nice houses, lots of money, free phones, free clothes, you name it. They really believed the streets were paved with gold.
Another aspect of this is that if you are really poverty stricken, you can't afford the journey. There are reports of some of these migrants paying thousands of dollars to people traffickers. They are not exactly destitute. To pay this kind of money means you have more wealth at your disposal than a hellova lot of working class Brits.