Rank order of preference to be top 10% in for me: US > Vietnam > South Africa

So your method does not disabuse me of my belief. It’s quite clear that equality has not made Vietnam more desirable than the US. In fact, there are some 400k foreign born in Vietnam (<1%) vs the US having 15% foreign born (a stark enough difference made worse by forcing foreign-born to be from non-neighbors). So I must reasonably conclude that my rank order is likely shared by others and that others too are not, in fact, lured by equality.

There is an old immortal tweet: cars have windows and go; houses have windows and don’t go; so it’s not the windows that make things go.

If inequality were as critical we’d expect a perfect rank ordering of distant migrant population attempts matching it. The numbers are so vastly different that one cannot conclude equality is of great importance to most.