You should be an Immigrant

I recently wrote an essay called The Geography of Ambition. You can think of the following as a sort of addendum to that and should read it if you haven’t yet.

You should be an immigrant, even if it’s for a short, defined period in your life. Here’s why.

The word “immigrant” has been sullied and marketing terms such as “expat” have emerged. But that’s mainly so that people from countries with developed economies can differentiate themselves from the rest. We shall do away with this pretension and uniformly refer to anyone living in a foreign country as an immigrant.

People migrate for different reasons. Some flee danger and others pursue opportunity. I’m specifically referring to the latter here.

I should point out the obvious: the ability to move to another country already implies some sort of relative privilege - whether financial or educational. People against immigration will often argue these people should remain in their own countries and help build it out of patriotic and civic duty. I believe this is down to an individual’s own values rather than some sort of moral obligation.

However, if we assume that humans are generally self-interested, rational agents, it then makes sense for someone to go where their skills are most highly valued. Opportunity is not uniformly distributed around the globe. This is a real challenge for developing economies that often face brain drains if wages and career prospects are not enticing enough for their skilled workers.

However, to frame immigration purely as economic optimisation misses the more important point.

Being an immigrant forces you into a position of productive discomfort. You are suddenly illiterate again. You don’t know the social shortcuts, the acceptable small talk and the invisible hierarchies. Everyday tasks become exercises in humility. You start speaking more slowly and listening more carefully. Competence is contextual and confidence, stripped of familiarity, must be rebuilt from first principles.

When you live in your country of origin, many things are handed to you invisibly such as language, cultural intuition, and social forgiveness. As an immigrant, none of these are guaranteed and you earn them incrementally. This has the useful side effect of separating what you are from what you’ve merely inherited. You discover which parts of your identity are essential and which were simply convenient.

There is also a moral education that comes with being foreign. Once you have been “an outsider,” it becomes much harder to caricature outsiders elsewhere. You gain a sort of empathy by having your own position weakened.

You stop assuming that your norms are universal or optimal. Many things you thought were “natural” are merely local maxima. They are solutions optimised for a specific history, geography, and set of incentives.

From a career perspective, immigrants tend to overlearn. When your right to be somewhere feels provisional, in my own experience, you tend to prepare more thoroughly. Over time, this compounds into an edge. It isn’t because immigrants are inherently superior, but because the environment demands more of them.

So yes, opportunity may not be evenly distributed. I’d argue that you should go wherever your skills are valued (this is increasingly changing and industry specific).
But don’t stop there. Go where your assumptions will be challenged. Go where you are slightly uncomfortable. Go where you must explain yourself.