As an immigrant and a person who loves to travel, I often ponder what does nation mean to me? I am on the verge of surrendering the nationality of one to take up another as my country of birth does not allow dual citizenship.
I have agonized over what it means today,
what it might mean in the long run, what would it mean for my son who hardly knows my country of birth, what would it mean 200 years from now?
I am one of the earlier generations of a wave of technology migrants in a world that is becoming increasingly insular and nativist.
I think of all great human migrations of the past when our earliest ancestors spread out of the safety of their African origins to populate the earth, Genghis Khan's ultimate unification of Eurasia,
the Spanish conquistadors and colonization of Latin America, the slave traders,
the colonial free trade thinkers who moved swaths of humanity from one corner of the earth to their plantations and the recent waves of the technology migrants.
Today travelling through a major truly global airports like Doha, London, Singapore or Frankfurt (no not Atlanta) feels like going through the spaceport
at Mos Eisley and most transporters are no better than the junk bucket.
So, 200 years from now what will my migrant generation look like? What kind of world will they inherit? What will be the definition and meaning of nation, borders and migration?
Resources will shrink, populations will rise in places and diminish in others, migratory forces and incentives will change, artificial intelligence and machine learning will create completely new economic equations.
And a Mos Eisley on our Tatooine is not very difficult to imagine. But what citizenship will the droids have or will they be banned from the Mos Eisley Cantina just like in the movie?
