Move, page 24
Hustling is life—and it’s not done standing still. The cardinal virtues for talented youth today are connectivity and mobility: the skills to work from anywhere and the willingness to go anywhere. The word “hub” is defined as a place where people or businesses converge; now it’s also a verb: Young people “hub” out of cities and move around between them. This new “cloud lifestyle” entails “living on demand” in various membership communities as well, depending on where you need to be or simply want to be, or where the best offer presents itself.
A pair of Estonian startups has paved the way for the growing caste of digital nomads who spend an estimated $2 billion per year just on visa processing. Jobbatical, which arranges positions for young professionals based on skills and geographic interests, now also provides relocation services. Its motto is: “Your skills matter more than your passport.” Similarly, Teleport created a marketplace for tech talent seeking short-term positions around the world, along the way building an enormous dataset of their preferences and advising cities on how to attract them.1 Its motto: “Free People Move.” The easier mobility becomes, the more youth will take advantage of it, treating each location as, in the words of Jobbatical founder Karoli Hindriks, “permanent until it’s time to go.”
From Canada to Singapore, highly skilled migrant programs are proliferating as countries seek to recruit skilled workers.II Some already have the legal infrastructure to make it as easy as possible to be a nomadic global citizen. Estonia’s e-residency program offers business registration with EU access, and comes with a glossy ID card and sleek black USB key that decrypts your entry to the country’s online services—which is all services. So far the offering has attracted mostly other Europeans, but also entrepreneurs from as far as Brazil, who are using Estonia as a base to raise European capital for online learning platforms targeting Asia. In 2020, the country adopted a “digital nomad visa” allowing visitors to stay and work remotely for foreign companies, and it is developing a cloud-based pension system that mobile workers can pay into and collect anywhere. In a world of e-wallets and cryptocurrencies, today’s youth need not be tied to a single national financial system.
Across the world, debt is saddling public finances and higher taxes are stifling citizen spending. Logically, enterprising youth will decamp to places where today’s oceans of financial capital actually translate into tangible opportunities for them, whether through crowdfunding or rebates for software and equipment. In Sweden and Singapore, governments actively distribute grants to startups as well. Youth also want to live in countries with guaranteed wages and benefits, as well as four-day workweeks (or shorter workdays). Finland and New Zealand have become the pioneers of such policies, which have resulted in higher productivity, lower incidence of mental illness, and for women better work-life balance.
It’s revealing that the countries ranking high in both competitiveness and resilience to disruptions are all small countries.2 With little land or margin for error, they treat people as their most precious resource, regularly retraining workers for higher-skilled jobs. Singapore is relentless in preparing youth for careers as fintech investors, digital healthcare specialists, data scientists, and cybersecurity experts.3 Many countries, such as Portugal and Canada, are retooling themselves to attract those who are digitally global but want the best of life that is physically local. Lifestyle-conscious Europeans have come to favor small cities in small countries, motivated by articles in Lonely Planet and Monocle that put Lausanne, Bergen, Innsbruck, Porto, Reykjavik, and Eindhoven on their radar.
Not everyone has the ability to move to such bucolic settings and work remotely, but with digital mobility, jobs can come to you even if you are not (yet) geographically mobile. Technology has dematerialized goods, services, and money, turning them into bits instantaneously warped around the world. It was inevitable that this would happen to human minds too. As Harvard economist Ricardo Hausmann explains, in the knowledge economy, each of us is a “person-byte” in the ecosystem that produces software and apps. We make code, do translations, upload photos, edit text, and other functions. Richard Baldwin of the University of Geneva similarly points to how people’s brains “migrate” when they become “tele-migrants.”4 The very phrase “knowledge society” better describes this transnational digital milieu than it does any single country.
America’s biggest tech companies are headquartered in California, but in reality they’re everywhere in the cloud. Their AI-powered recruitment platforms evaluate millions of job applications from every corner of the planet, and they manage globally distributed virtual teams. The Trump administration unwisely suspended the H1-B visa program to prevent Indian software engineers from coming to America, but Silicon Valley smartly responded by outsourcing more work to Hyderabad and Hanoi. Whether on Amazon Mechanical Turk or GitHub, tens of millions of people have already achieved economic mobility through digital mobility—mobility without moving. But as with step migration from rural to urban to international, economic mobility is followed by physical mobility: moving to a better home or city, or abroad for a better job with a higher salary. The more people get educated and employed online, the more we can expect this chain reaction to catapult people away from home.
Cloud companies and their workers are prepared for a mobile world in ways their countries of origin are not. A handful of sovereign governments have awoken to the opportunity to offer digital services to citizens of anywhere. Indeed, what a number of these new “residency” schemes have in common is that they do not actually require you to be a resident. Estonia is just as interested in global nomads using its banks and doing business across the EU as it is in them physically living in Estonia. (Appropriately, in the event of another Russian occupation, Estonia has all of its data and functions backed up onto servers distributed around the world, so it could become a diaspora cloud nation if need be.) Similarly, Dubai’s Virtual Commercial City (VCC) license provides a portal for foreign businesses to have an onshore presence in a tax-free country, a modification of the UAE’s recent history of providing offshore “freezones.” There are an estimated 35 million companies in the world that are location independent and could register anywhere. Dubai wants to get a bigger slice.
As a next phase, chief futurist of the Dubai government Noah Raford wants city-states to look beyond onshore-versus-offshore distinctions toward a “no shore” model in which countries actively lease space to innovators seeking test beds for their new technologies, regulations, and communities. They are not selling their sovereignty but rather upgrading into hybrid physical and digital republics that provide financial, medical, and educational certifications. In this emerging marketplace of governance services, the physical-digital sequence is inverted: You build a digital relationship with a government service provider (not necessarily your own), use its services wherever you are, and leverage its credibility to gain physical access to that country or associated ones.
What comes next as our world becomes ever more a hybrid reality? Imagine a corporate or civic platform established in an allied state that hosts its servers. Using blockchain protocols, it operates like a cross between Tor (encrypted browser), GitHub (coding collaboration), Bitcoin (cryptocurrency), and TransferWise (cross-border finance), enabling digital work with masked IPs and global access to cash. Millions of remote workers join this cloud republic, voting on its internal policies and building bargaining power over the governments where they each physically reside. Countries will then have two choices: either extort the cloud-based workforce within your country—which may prompt many to leave—or join with other host states in forming a digital version of the medieval Hanseatic League that grants access to more members of this nomadic class and benefits from its innovations.
Remember that most countries are small—both geographically and demographically. They resemble atoms in which most of the population and economic mass is located in the capital city and the rest is hinterland. As their populations age or depart, they may have little choice but to sell off land or islands to startup nations shopping for the right jurisdiction. This may be geopolitics in a quantum age.
Aging but not slowing down
Fifty is not the new twenty. But fifty-somethings now have to play the same mobility arbitrage game as their children. In 2008, many dreams of beachfront retirement went up in smoke. Comfy pensions evaporated as workers were shoved into early redundancy in their prime. The pandemic has done the same—but with even longer-lasting consequences when compounded by automation and an anemic economic recovery. Many laid off during the financial crisis never recovered; they moved to cheaper towns, where they string together various gigs, such as driving for Uber, to cover their bills or care for their spouse. They’ll have to keep working: On average, today’s retirees have only half of what they need given their longer lifespans. And as the debt soars, the retirement age will rise, as will income taxes. Now it’s happening all over again to an even younger cohort—except it’s way too early for today’s mid-career victims of the pandemic depression to retire—not that they could afford to. The nicest euphemism for what lies ahead is “life transition.”
For Americans who only have the energy or cash for one last move, Canada has become the sensible choice. The number of American retirees collecting their Social Security abroad is highest in Canada, followed by Mexico and Japan.III Many websites already advertise the best places to retire in Canada—and the list just keeps getting longer. But now that Mexico, Costa Rica, and Panama have launched retirement visas and physical communities explicitly to attract Americans, they’ll also attract ever more aging Americans. These Central American countries rank far higher in happiness surveys than they do in wealth, indicating a low cost of living with general societal stability. Canadian “snowbirds” (retirees who used to flock to Florida for the winter) may well migrate to Central America too as Florida’s climate worsens. Or, as Canada warms, they might as well stay in Canada during the milder winters as well.
For those with chronic conditions or concerns about healthcare costs, medical tourism abroad will become medical residency. Already more than 1.4 million mostly middle-aged and elderly Americans travel abroad annually for operations ranging from knee replacements to fertility treatments to plastic surgery. Even millennials have reported traveling as far as Egypt and Colombia for skin treatments and dental work. While the most popular destinations for American medical tourists have been India, Israel, Malaysia, Thailand, and South Korea, Canada could easily take top spot if it brands itself as an affordable climate and health oasis for American retirees. They can be forgiven for taking their savings elsewhere after witnessing their medical system triage away elderly lives during the coronavirus pandemic.
Europeans have a higher life expectancy than Americans as well as greater pension portability, making international retirement even more seamless. As EU countries cut benefits and raise the retirement age, ever more elderly will shift to cheaper “Club Med” southern Europe—Spain, Italy, and Greece (while those countries send youth northward). Asian destinations will also continue to rise in the ranks of havens for cash-strapped Western retirees. In 2018, Thailand issued its highest ever number of retirement visas to Brits, followed by Americans and Germans. Even after a lifetime living in one country, such as America, their destiny is global.
Rich retirees have already opted for mobility as a lifestyle choice. Some reside 250 days or more per year on cruise ships such as the Viking Sun, perpetually sailing around the world, docking in more than one hundred ports across fifty countries. One ship known as The World is owned by the 130 families who permanently reside on it, making it something of a micro mobile sovereign. Healthy retirees with more modest means cleverly see the world by changing cruise ships every few months, paying less per month than they would in assisted living facilities. Before the pandemic, half of the 25 million annual cruise ship passengers worldwide were retirees or baby boomers. While the lockdown stranded many cruise ships at sea, a growing number, such as Oceania and Utopia, have been retrofitted with residences and full-time medical care to accommodate permanently mobile retirees. And the more cruise ships there are, the greater the demand for hundreds of thousands of cooks, cleaners, singers, card dealers, doctors, and nurses, especially from India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. In the future, they may well be safer than those staying on land.
Why it’s time for a global “passport”
For centuries before World War I, people traveled the world without passports. European settlers arrived in North America as pilgrims fleeing monarchy or migrants fleeing famine, with neither money nor documents to their name. The fluidity of imperial zones such as the British empire nurtured generations of subjects moving across colonies from East Africa to Southeast Asia. The origin of the passport is much less as a restrictive certificate denoting exclusive identity than a laissez passer, a request for safe passage. While serving as ambassador to France in 1780, Benjamin Franklin made his own American passport to request entry into the Netherlands. But after World War I, migration became so bureaucratized that passports are now one of the chief barriers to a more sensible human geography.
How can we return to a world where passports don’t stand for who you are, but simply identify you on your way to where you’re going? The first step would be a technological platform at the intersection of blockchain and biometrics. Embassies and consulates today are overwhelmed with visa applications, each with marginally different requirements that could easily be streamlined. Global databases could also iron out the discrepancies between physical and digital IDs, and border checkpoints could be better connected to them. This data could be stored on the blockchain, updated and verified for ongoing usage. For several years, the International Air Travel Association (IATA), customs agencies, and booking websites have been working to digitize these pain points. They advocate an opt-in repository of traveler data to be shared as needed for speedy approval. Remember that almost all countries and their businesses want these tourists and businesspeople, but their movement is stifled in pre-technological bureaucratic purgatory. It should matter less that you are Bolivian, Nigerian, or Vietnamese, and more that you as an individual have provided sufficient accurate information to gain entry, such as your recent whereabouts, criminal history, employment records, and health status. Many Americans can surely appreciate the desire to be differentiated from their countrymen: Having failed to sufficiently lock down, Americans were collectively punished, barred from travel to Canada, Europe, and most other desirable destinations where the coronavirus was more effectively contained.
This same system could eventually liberate billions of working-class individuals from the friction associated with their national identity, whether Asians from China, India, and Southeast Asian nations, or Arabs, Turks, and South Americans. As economist Branko Milanovic argues, their citizenship is a tax arbitrarily assigned based on their location of birth. Yet these regions are home to the labor pool dozens of countries need, whether farmers or construction workers or nurses. The most important passports of the future are skills and health rather than nationality. We should judge individuals not by the accident of birth, but on their potential to contribute to society. By divorcing mobility from nationality, we circumvent biases people face for coming from countries that are poor or at war. The mobile workers of the world don’t have collective bargaining power, but everyone would benefit from certifying their mobility.
The global education sector also desperately needs such a system, both to maintain the large number of foreign students on which Western universities depend and to ensure a steady supply for their international branches that deliver classes on-site in developing countries. The same goes for global companies moving employees around along their supply chains. Universities and companies should team up and push for a large-scale laissez passer to overcome the redundancies they face in moving students and professionals around the world.
A parallel digital identification that circumvents unnecessary bureaucracy is not a competitor or threat to national citizenship and passports. Citizenship confers rights to land ownership, voting, and legal protections, and denotes significant obligations ranging from military service to taxation. What is needed is a supplemental protocol and clearinghouse that crowds in data: national ID cards, passport photos, fingerprints, mobile phone accounts, bank statements, criminal history, employment records, travel logs, health status, and so forth. Once verified, this information could be visible only temporarily, as needed, to relevant authorities. Indeed, it would be just as useful for domestic priorities such as digital voting as for international mobility.
A globally trusted ID database would help countries know whom they can safely let in based on their good standing, and it can also help them more easily decide whom to keep out—including some of their own citizens. Four of the eight terrorists in the November 2015 attacks in Paris were French citizens. Thousands of Western passport holders from America to Australia have pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda or ISIS and fought on their behalf in Iraq and Syria. Whether racially Caucasian, Arab, or African, their passports have allowed them to easily return home and wreak havoc. Anti-immigrant European politicians have cited terrorism as an excuse to restrict refugee inflows, but migration restrictions won’t diminish the pool of homegrown radicals. Requiring individuals to rigorously demonstrate where they have been and then verifying that information is a better way to stay ahead of nimble terrorists of all complexions.
Now is a unique opportunity to bring about a system that empowers rather than restrains the billions of individuals whose freer mobility could benefit world society. It’s also a chance to digitally prepare for an era of mass migrations resulting from political collapse and climate change, in which hundreds of millions of people may circulate in a constant flux of unpredictable multidirectional movements. Mankind is capable of a better approach to managing cross-border movements, whether on the blockchain or eventually chips embedded under our skin. Mobility is our best insurance against volatility. When the next crisis comes, we’ll be glad we have it.
